Reaching Through the Portal

 “Hola, ¿Cómo están? ¿Cómo fue su fin de semana?” With those words, another Monday morning has begun. Looking out at the faces of my students, I take a quick inventory. As usual, the ones who chose seats in the front of the classroom are alert, ready to start and, I can bet, did their homework over the weekend. I take note of those still talking, their backs turned; the stragglers that are coming through the door, their excuses tumbling from their mouths; and those who stare straight ahead, reticent to engage, even after spending an hour with me each morning for the last five weeks.

 I make a special effort to say hello to these particular students and ask them how their weekend was. “Fine,” “I had to work” are the standard replies. But sometimes they’ll raise their eyes to meet mine, and I’ll confront a face clouded with grief. “My grandma died.”

These students aren’t your typical university freshmen and sophomores. They didn’t participate in the rite of passage of their high school counterparts upon graduation, the one-hour drive north to attend the University of Oregon, to become a Duck. These are the sons and daughters, and often the husbands and wives, of the working class of Douglas County, Oregon, whose median poverty rate rests at 20%. The deck has been stacked against them for a long time. They’ve watched the timber industry, which, in its heyday, created steady jobs and a thriving local economy, be decimated by over-harvesting, cheap Chinese imports, environmental regulation, and automation. Their dads, after twenty years in the woods, might sit beside them in class as part of the job re-training that federal money offers. When Dad can’t find work, even after retraining, Mom will enroll in classes, hoping to translate homemaker skills into a career in accounting, nursing or child education.

Broken homes, domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and teen pregnancy form the mosaic of their lives. But so does the strength of the faith community they belong to, the joy of hunting and fishing among the exquisite forests and green-gold waters of the Umpqua watershed; and most essentially, the multi-generational ties of family that weave through the county, a network of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews; a web that remains strong and resilient against all odds.

Thus, I learned, in my years of teaching at the local community college, that when a student tells me she has lost her grandmother, she is mourning the loss of that person who kept her safe, pushed her to dream, told her she was pretty, or smart, or, without words, that she was loved.

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I began teaching at Umpqua Community College after earning my Master’s degree in Romance Languages, Spanish and French. In one way, I was similar to several of my older students, as I had returned to college at forty-two years of age, while raising my daughter as a single mom. But that is where the comparison ends. Many of my students are the first of their family to go to college. I am the daughter of university professors. Teachers, lawyers, and nurses fill the ranks of my extended family. I was raised on the mantra that education was the passport to a decent life, and would “keep the wolf from your doorstep”—my mother’s words to me as I stood in her kitchen contemplating whether to finish my Bachelor’s. Then she added, “What would we have become, after your father died, if I hadn’t had my degree and couldn’t return to the classroom?”

I didn’t argue with her, a widow with nine children who had raised us on her part-time faculty salary and my father’s veteran’s benefits.

I conveyed that message to my students, when they came to me questioning the value of the hours of studying, the debt they were taking on, the investment of years they would need to get a nursing degree or a teacher’s license. I told them of my own fatigue after the first year of my Master’s program, when I sat at the edge of campus and didn’t think I could undertake the intense rigorous study, the incessant writing of papers, and the responsibility of raising my child in the midst of it all, for a whole other year.  “But I told myself, it’s only one more year. And then you’re done. And they can never take that piece of paper away from you.”

And I would look at my students and emphasize that it takes one day at a time, one assignment at a time, one class at a time. And I affirmed that they had the perseverance to make it to the finish line.

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The classes I taught were primarily pre-requisites of a four year degree, meaning that an individual had to pass two terms of a foreign language to be eligible to graduate from the state system. My classes were filled with folks trying to meet that requirement, their motivation very different from the handful of students who wanted to master the Spanish or French language.

At first, I chafed at the idea that my class was just a hoop, albeit an exotic one, that students had to jump through to earn their degree. But over time, I came to relish the fact that Spanish 101 and 102 were mandatory; I recognized the part I played in the development of each student as a thinking, feeling being who had the right to pursue something bigger, something better, something more than what they had been offered up to that point.

The mechanics of language and the intricacies of culture became the portal through which I interacted with these students. They allowed me to create an environment that reflected my belief that each individual was worthy of my respect, but even more so, worthy of their own.

It would begin simply enough: a drill of the ABC’s or the counting to ten, which I hoped would help students relax and consider that maybe this Spanish stuff wasn’t so bad after all. An assignment that demanded they sing the eight basic question words to the tune of Jingle Bells had them in stitches, especially when a student would volunteer to perform a solo. The fundamentals of the language were the baby steps they took, and with each attempt I applauded and praised.

When a student couldn’t get his tongue around the Spanish “rr,” or kept reading “a” as the English long “a” rather than the Spanish “ah,” I would prompt them to try again. “Say it for me once more.” When they mastered the sound, I’d make a big deal of it, telling the class, “Okay, big applause for Taylor.”

Through the conjugation of AR verbs, the difference between “el” and “la,” and the myriad concepts needed to be taught in ten weeks, I communicated to each person that I believed in them, in their potential to set goals and meet them, to persevere until they accomplished the task in front of them; and in their innate ability to acquire knowledge.

“I can’t learn a language, I can’t. I failed Spanish in high school,” they’d wail.

“What language do you speak now?” I’d ask.

“What do you mean?”

“You learned English, didn’t you? That’s a language. If you couldn’t speak English, then I might agree… but you’ve already learned a language.”

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My “method” of teaching—unconditional acceptance of each student’s inherent worth, and their right to be treated with dignity—didn’t emerge from the pedagogy classes I took, nor did it manifest fully in my first or second year of teaching. As I strive to articulate its origins, I realize it came about as a result of interacting, day in and day out, over a period of years, with the distinctly unique individuals who sat in front of me: flawed, wounded, scared, beaten down, beaten up; yet still hopeful, alive, yearning.

In effect, my students taught me—by the way they lit up after receiving a word of praise; by the straightening of shoulders and the lifting of a head after hearing that they scored the highest grade in the class; by the excitement in their voice as they shared their idea for their term project—that encouragement, authentic caring, and the gift of respect are fundamental to the nurturing of a soul.

It never failed to amaze me how, in a classroom environment in which positive feedback —no matter how small the gains—was the underlying philosophy, students who were afraid to speak began to raise their hands, older women who had been told they didn’t “have the smarts to go to college” aced their first test, and eighteen year olds who hadn’t ever been on a plane began to dream of visiting Paris.

Dreaming. I learned of its extraordinary power from my students. They taught me that no matter how limited our circumstances, how narrow the horizon, how steep the climb, each person has a dream, and given the right nutrients, water, and sunlight, that seed of a dream will push upward and reveal itself in all its beauty.

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Teaching in this rural county of southern Oregon, whose median income was $40,000 in 2013, and whose inhabitants are likely to have traveled as far north as Vancouver, Washington or Spokane, and as far east as Boise, but no farther, I realized I had an obligation to introduce my students to the wider world, to loosen the constraints of the white, working class milieu they had grown up in. I attempted this through the teaching of culture.

In the first Spanish class of Fall term, I asked students to define the word, stereotype, and then to write down any stereotype they might be holding vis-a-vis Mexican or Hispanic people. (First, I had to delineate the difference between those two cultural identities.) The rest of the term I endeavored to undo those stereotypes by introducing the history, art, social constructs and political realities of Mexico, Spain and various Central and South American countries.

Students discussed the paintings of Fernando Botero and Frida Kahlo, attempted to dissect Picasso’s Guernica while studying the Spanish Civil War, and built altars in honor of their deceased relatives during the Days of the Dead. At term’s end, they chose a research subject and enlightened their peers on the correct protocol during the Running of the Bulls, the fine points of Tex-Mex music, or the ritual of maté drinking in contemporary Argentina.

Knowledge is Power. A righteous ideal to uphold, one might think, until you have the experience, visceral and in your face, of the potency that lies in the dissemination of information.

The most provocative class I taught delineated the reasons people leave their homes and family to face the dangers of crossing the U. S. border in hope of a better life. The conversation was electric, different students loudly proclaiming the “wrongness” of entering the country illegally, while others quietly considered the question I posed.

“Think about where Mexico sits, its proximity to the U.S. If you were making $20.00 a week, and you heard, over and over again, that you could make four times that much in a day, would you consider crossing the border?”

At the end of the class, a young woman approached my desk, her eyes downcast. I sensed that she was scared to speak, so I initiated the dialogue.

“How can I help you, Mandy?”

She looked pleadingly at me, as if to say, Don’t be mad at me. Then she muttered, “I don’t know where Mexico is.”

Unable to hide my surprise, I remember thinking that she was joking. I had to quickly change my expression to one of concern when I realized she was telling the truth.

“Well, you know where California is, and Texas…”

She nodded hesitantly.

I felt myself grow angry. How did this person make it through high school, pass the placement tests of this college, and be able to stand there and admit to such an appalling lack of basic geography?

“Come with me,” and I led her over to the campus library where a large map of the world hung.

“Here we are,” pointing to Oregon. “Here, at the bottom of California, and all across here…” and I ran my finger in a line through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, “…is the border between the U.S. and Mexico. So, can you see why Mexico’s location was an important factor in our discussion today?”

Moments such as these became transit points in my trajectory as an educator. The ideal became real, and I began to feel the weight of the responsibility I carried as someone who opened doors, whose utterances in front of the classroom re-aligned the molecular structure of my students’ base of knowledge, and once in a while, shattered their world.

Lindy was a forty-three year old housewife pursuing a nursing degree. She dutifully handed in assignments, participated in class and was a cheerful, industrious student. In Winter term, I taught the history of the Americas through the introduction of leaders such as Fidel Castro, Eva Peron and Simón Bolivar. After a quick summary, I’d inform the class that they were to study one of these leaders in depth for their research project.

Lindy became interested in The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the group of Argentine women who defied the military junta during the 70’s and 80’s in demanding information about their loved ones who had been disappeared. I lent her books and films about “Las Madres,” pleased to see her excited about her project.

Late one morning, Lindy appeared at my office door. “Can I talk to you?” A shading of fear and sadness colored her words.

“Of course, come in.” I offered her a chair, closing the door behind her. Her demeanor told me this needed to be a private conversation.

“Something is happening to me, and I don’t understand it. I’m reading these books, and they’re making me see everything differently. I never used to think about things like this, and now I have to. You’ve turned my world upside down.”

I remained silent, letting her say all that was on her mind.

“These mothers, they’re just like me. Some of them are my age. And all they want is to get their children back. That could have been me. They could have taken my daughter, and that would have been me.”

She began to cry. I waited, and then said, “You’re a very special person to be able to feel the pain of these women who live a continent away. I understand your fear. It’s like the curtain has been pulled back, and you’re confronted with a new reality that doesn’t fit into the old one.”

“Yes, yes,” she concurred.

“But isn’t that what you came to college for? To learn about the world, to open up your world?”

“I wrote a poem. I want to know if I can read it as part of my presentation.”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”

The next day, Lindy stood in front of her classmates, her hair covered in a white bandana, her daughter’s name stitched across the front of it, a replica of the panuelas Las Madres wore in their weekly protests in front of the Presidential Palace. She read a poem dedicated to Las Madres, a poem from one mother to another, expressing her pain, her sadness, and her solidarity with women thousands of miles away.

I was humbled, and in awe. More than any lecture, statistics or thesis I could have pointed to, Lindy’s presentation demonstrated the universality of the human experience. She spun a thread of light that reached out to touch not only those of us in that classroom that day, but, I envision, a solitary woman in an apartment in Buenos Aires who mourns her child, but understands that she is not alone.

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The stories are endless: the former homeless drug addict who gained a spot in a highly competitive program at the University of Oregon; the woman in the back of the classroom—Goth-attired, insolent, uncommunicative—who, after weeks of nudging, began to participate and demonstrated an extraordinary level of fluency; the student who began her academic career in my Spanish 101, and is now earning her PhD at the University of Chicago.

Each one of my students had a story worth telling. And my job for fifteen years was to listen for it beneath the self-deprecation, the lack of confidence, the years of being told, “you’re not good enough;” despite the defeat instilled in them by family members who ridiculed, spouses who abandoned them, and school systems that left them to drown.

For many of my students, my classroom was the first place they heard that they mattered, where they were seen for who they were, and more importantly, for who they could become. Once I heard even a whisper of what that student wished for, dreamed of, and was capable of, I drew out the most powerful tool I possessed, the one that never disappointed, and wielded it with fervor.

The subject was World Languages. The most effective teaching tool proved to be love.

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On Oct 1, 2015, ten weeks after I retired, a student opened fire in a classroom in Snyder Hall at Umpqua Community College, killing his professor and eight other students. I had taught in that classroom, had my office in Snyder Hall for the bulk of my teaching career at UCC, and for five horrible hours, didn’t know which, if any, of my beloved colleagues had been killed. This essay is dedicated to Larry Levine, my friend, who died that day; to the students who lost their lives in the act of educating themselves; and to their families, for whom no words can ever console.