0.
Day off. I've been reading. Hit the 62% mark in Victim by
and hope to finish it tomorrow and review it Wednesday.A long spell of Boryga's book is set on a college campus and reminded me for some reason of this episode I think about, maybe once a week, from when I worked at a local college in Miami.
It's Sunday, so here it is. Just the story. Restive as the day.
1.
I worked in a college tutoring center for eight years after I got my BA and the first students to come in, every semester, were the middle-age students with full-time jobs.
They were usually the most consistent and studious and they tended to have the hardest time.
One thing making it harder for the thirty-, forty-, fiftysomethings (emotionally at least) is they sometimes had college degrees already. Professional licenses in their home country. Lawyers, engineers. Then they had to leave, usually because of politics, and now they’re here, starting from scratch, struggling (against pride and patience and traffic) to get through Algebra 1.
The older students worked hardest but in the tutoring lab they cried more than other students. Usually in frustration. Slapping at tears like bugs. Verklempt at some assignment that, often as not, their overworked adjunct professor had either not done a great job explaining or, worse, designing.
Like for instance there was a part-time teacher of Public Speaking (SPC 1101) named Barbara who’d had a brain tumor successfully removed not too long ago, everything went fine, but her students kept reporting to the dean that Barbara was interrupting her lectures to ask who was making “THAT NOISE,” which in fact she alone could hear; or at least everyone concluded that she alone could hear it because, when asked to describe the noise, Barbara just cocked her head, and deadpanned the questioner, “Don’t pretend.” She insisted that she was being sleighted but refused to say what the sleight was, thinking the whole gaslighty point of the prank was that a student would create some minor annoyance, and then pretend it was undetectable, which then put Barbara in the position of having to describe this noise (the way mechanics allegedly get a kick out of asking customers to simulate the rasps and clanks coming out of their engine block) so that, while standing up there and whistling or hissing or whatever, Barbara would sound either hypersensitive or crazy — which, for someone who’d just dealt with brain surgery, was probably a very painful/delicate position to be put in.
2.
Barbara’s final project for SPC 1101 was called “The Sales Pitch.” Students would go to the front of the room and present “an everyday household item,” something we take for granted, and then sell it to the class.
The rhetorical/imaginative challenge was to depict a world in which this item doesn’t exist yet, thereby dramatizing its utility/value.
It was a clever assignment. It made people think.
The obstacle was that Barbara had weird obstinate ideas about what does and does not constitute “an everyday household item.” Also, since she used “Toothbrush” as the example on her instruction sheet, nobody was allowed to do their sales pitch about “Toothbrush.”
Fair enough.
But when somebody did their speech on Listerine she got furious and said they were trying to get around the “No Toothbrush” rule.
So now she added another rule: nobody’s speech can be “Mouthwash.”
It was too similar to “Toothbrush.”
Over the last couple classes of the term it happened again when someone tried to do their speech about dental floss, and another about condoms and another about waterpicks — which of course became a tacit acknowledgement that, likelier than not, someone had been fucking with her in class, making tiny noises.
Maybe.
Except she had some of those older/more-responsible students too and I don’t think they would’ve just sat by while it happened.
When finally the dean took up some of these issues, in the last day or two of the semester, she called the complainants into her office, just off the writing center, and she heard their speeches, and graded them according to the rubric, and sent Barbara an email saying, “Enter these grades before tomorrow.”
And she did, without comment.
3.
The reason those middle-aged professional students would cry during these tutoring sessions is because English was their second language; and so they had these vast, nuanced, adult ideas, percolating through their minds in Spanish, that they were trying to squeeze out through the tiny aperture of what was basically (no insult here) a third-grade English vocabulary.
It was gutting to see. Often they would lean back from their assignment laughing at one of their linguistic flubs and the laugh would turn a little zany and then suddenly they’re wiping away tears. Still smiling. “Sorry.” Rolling the Rs.
Until eventually, without encouragement, just a long breath through puffed-out cheeks, they’d lean forward, and conjure a tired smile, and try again.
“You have no idea how smart I am in Spanish” - Gloria in Modern Family
I felt this. I sometimes tell my Italian boyfriend it's hard for me to be funny in Italian and he comforts me by saying I'm not funny in English either. Languages are so much more vast than I realized and even seven years in I still feel like an idiot on some days. The amount of courage it would take to start over professionally like these students. Very cool you worked there. Beautiful writing.