Pomp and circumstance and the Associate’s degree

Last Thursday evening was the 47th annual commencement of North Shore Community College. It’s not a venerable old school, nor storied, nor bricked and ivied, but it is scrappy. North Shore is a school for underdogs, hard luck cases, and tenacious workers. I will not distort reality and ennoble all the students there, or view them through a soft focus lens of sentimentality. After all, Christina is a North Shore student. In my short time teaching there, I have had plenty of abject failures. Some dropped out under some personal duress they wouldn’t talk to me about; some just weren’t really committed; some weren’t ready for college; some faced too steep a language barrier. I think about many of those students and wonder where they went, and what happened to them. They are my phantoms, slipping away. Thursday night though, I saw instead the successes. It was the best commencement I’ve ever attended. Fancy prep school, my beloved land grant university, Ivy League law school, prestigious New England institutions of every stripe–none of them could match the spectacle of a North Shore graduation.

The graduates, stuck between the faculty and their families. As usual. (thanks to Diana Davis for this photo)

By some accident of profound disorganization, I found myself, an adjunct instructor with a mere two years’ experience, nearly at the head of the processional, and thus, seated in the front row. My department chair, my dean, and countless gray-headed senior faculty were arrayed somewhere behind me. This was less awkward than absurd, but seemed genuinely in keeping with the spirit of the school; we do not stand on ceremony, and we are democratic in the deepest sense. The graduates, stepping forward to be announced, evinced a wide spectrum of interpretations of the evening’s gravitas. An unsmiling African immigrant gazed steadily out at the crowd and gave a small bow as his name was read. A few minutes later, a woman did not quite drop it low, but dropped it to at least a  moderate level before gliding across the stage. A nattily dressed black man tipped his chin high and straightened his bow tie. A somewhat embarrassed looking young white woman faced the room in a Batman costume and cape sewn to her open graduation gown. Students moonwalked, karate chopped and spun their way across the stage. They fist pumped or shuffled or stared fixedly ahead in a fit of nerves.

This is what I’ve learned, teaching at community college where we take all comers: I don’t know anything about anybody until I know him. I have seen every prejudice I didn’t know I had dismantled these past two years. What are people with autism like? What are single mothers like? Black people? Asian immigrants? What are veterans like? What are people who’ve been beaten, neglected, or trafficked as children like? My assumptions had not been negative overall, and that was part of the problem. Assume all veterans will be hard-working in school and you’ll be wrong (though they do tend to be rather more respectful than the average student.) Assume all autistic students will be stellar in their academic pursuits and you’ll be wrong again.

This is what I love about community college. At the beginning of the semester, I have no idea at all what sort of assemblage of humanity I will meet with that first day. They won’t all be talented, or smart, or hard-working, but if I’m lucky, many have at least one out of three. And it’s the hard workers crossing that commencement stage that brought tears unbidden to my eyes. Thursday night was the first time since the day I graduated veterinary school that I wore my velvet trimmed gown and my doctoral hood, and though the air was stifling in that arena, the weight of the hood at my neck was more welcome than the day it was first placed on me. Because this time, I wore it not in recognition of my own achievement, but in tribute to theirs.

As our band of gaudily streamered, sweaty faculty made our way out again, stopping to shake hands or hug students along the way, I thought it impossible that I could feel so proud of anything else I might do with my life than this.

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Boys will be kids

I don’t know how I might have parented daughters. I don’t have a daughter. Maybe it is very different from parenting sons, but I actually kind of doubt it. Humans like to find patterns in what are actually random events. The Virgin Mary in a piece of toast; Jesus on a potato chip; princess girls and rugged boys right out of the womb. Boys are wild and physical but emotionally simplistic. Girls just the opposite.

When I took my college students out into the woods this month on a drizzly evening, I plunged into a low, swampy area in pursuit of a frog. One student remarked, “Bet your parents couldn’t get you out of the woods at night, huh?” True. Gender norms were somewhat less rigidly divided in the 80s (for girls anyway), but I was clearly labeled a tomboy. Things are easier for a tomboy girl than for a “prissy” boy, to be sure though, and I know many a sensitive boy who’s had a really rough go of it. People like categories and boxes. They like clearly defined boy v. girl definitions, black and white in all things (including literally–my friend Christine recently brought to my attention the “Mahogany” line of Hallmark cards to help the apparently monolithic African-American population uniquely express themselves in a special way).

When my kids are dirt smeared and muddied to their knees and have sticks in their hair, people inevitably say, “They’re boys!” apparently oblivious to the fact that I, also dirt-caked, am not a boy, and never was, and I’m the one who led them into the muck to begin with. Being a boy isn’t what makes a kid like mucking in a swamp. Being a kid is. But if a mud-caked girl climbs out of a swamp with leeches dangling from her shins, no one’s smilingly saying, “Of course! She’s a girl!” Mud and leeches are not the girl default. Princess parties are!

It’s not all win for the boys either; I’ve seen abhorrent behavior passed off as normal. I’m not claiming that boys who beat frogs to death with sticks or catch butterflies just to pull their wings off are going to grow up to be serial killers, but they may in fact grow up to be like the guy I watched deliberately run over a painted turtle with his truck the other day. People seem to feel comforted by a predictable dynamic–boys fling a snake into the girls’ tea party; girls shriek and run. What I’ve found is that, if you give them the chance, boys and girls regress to the mean of simple curiosity and fascination. Fill a bucket with water and put a few bullfrog tadpoles in it. Boys swagger up with the bravado they’ve been taught, shove the tadpoles at the girls’ faces; girls squeal and recoil with the dainty revulsion they’ve been taught. Give them five minutes and they’re all quietly holding tadpoles, stroking their slimy skin and gently touching the tiny webbed feet emerging by the base of the tail. Girls and boys in uniformly hushed amazement, algae twined around their fingers. From the wrist down, you’d never tell them apart.

 

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Memory rounds a dirt track over and over again

This weekend, we went to our 15th high school reunion. We visit the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy frequently, living only one town away, so the physical nostalgia did not press in on us as it did on those coming back for the first time in more than a decade. Still, there are the small things: the window I would sit under on warm nights listening to the mysterious music coming from the Afro-Latino Exonian Society’s room; the corners and alcoves that seemed to my hormone-addled teenage mind more than secluded enough for making out, but which are revealed, in the stark light of adulthood, to be as public as a mall food court.

Twice over the course of the weekend, I found myself alone with my kids in the cage. The cage is a decrepit, dim, earthen floored indoor track with a high glass ceiling and dirt caked brick walls. The cage has a creaking, wooden, elevated deck for runners looking to keep out of the fray of whatever is happening on the ground floor. It has a concrete floored bathroom with a single toilet, a barred and cracked window, and a grime streaked towel for drying your hands. The cage is the underbelly of Exeter, as far as one can get from the life-sized whale skeleton hung in the sunny atrium of the new science building, or the bright airy spaces of the new student center. Fifteen minutes in the cage leaves a film of gray dirt on your teeth and blackened snot in your nose. I ran in the cage almost every day of every winter of the four years I was on the track team. I know the cage’s days are numbered, and I will mourn it when it’s gone. Or renovated, and bright and airy, which is as good as gone.

I came to Exeter from Amesbury, a town 10 miles south. I was a day student, dropped off every morning and fetched every evening by my father. I had no experience with privilege, wealth, foreign travel, and had previously met perhaps four people who were not white. I was mute in every class, taken unawares by the school’s Harkness system, a small group discussion format that paralyzed me with an anxiety that did not abate in the four years I was a student. I was bewildered, and intimidated, and very definitely in the wrong math class.

The cage’s sole window, in the bathroom cell.

I was also a somewhat feckless member of the track team. A naturally quick sprinter, fast out of the blocks, I was nonetheless a bane to my tirelessly enthusiastic coach. I had little interest in actually training. I failed to reach my “potential” by a fair distance. Despite that, the cage was my refuge, and my freedom. Before practice, I would arrive early and lie flat on my back on the pole vault mats in my second-hand running shoes and stare up at the slant winter light filtering through the dust-gray glass roof, thinking about math class, or my boyfriend, or whatever fresh horror had befallen me in class that day. Then I would rise with my teammates and plod around the track for training laps, waiting for the command to open it up and sprint. I could fly around the dark, banked corners of that track, and best people who were smarter, and richer, and much, much savvier about just about everything in the world.

My sons ran with me in the cage this weekend, and I taught them long jump in the same pit where I learned, and where I competed until a false step sheared my pelvis just a little ways from my spine and that was that, as far as jumping went.

When the cage is gone, the physical memory will go too. I will have the memory itself, but the ghosts will go, having nowhere left to haunt. I’m not against progress; I have progress to thank for Exeter in the first place, since girls weren’t admitted until 1970. And there have been decades of other good, though often slow, changes. But I’m not against tradition either, or the austere past, the scooped depressions worn into the Academy Building’s marble steps by generations of WASP boys, then Catholic and Jewish boys, black ones, then girls too, then all in every color and creed, from every quarter. The place itself has a long memory.

I have a picture of myself from the school newspaper hurtling into that same long jump pit, with my owlish glasses and frizzy pouf of hair. The walls bear the wooden, hand-lettered plaques with the names of hall of fame runners in the 40 yard dash, the 300 yard, all the races before things became modern, and metric. In the cage this weekend, I could almost see myself there as that girl again, racing down the runway to plant her toe on the board. I could almost touch her in the rush of air as my own son ran and leapt, over and over, through my own cold shade, the dust rising from his heels.

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To whom it may concern:

The following is a recommendation letter I wrote in response to a request from one of my students. I have changed the student’s name to protect her privacy. Let this serve as a lesson as to why one must choose one’s recommenders wisely. I told Christina that I doubted she would like what I had to say in my letter, but that I would send it if she wished. In one of her only wise actions of the semester, she declined.

 

Dear members of the admissions committee,

It is always a challenge to write a recommendation letter for a mediocre student. Fortunately, Christina is no mediocre student, and I write in full-throated opposition to her admission to your institution. I hesitated to write this letter, particularly because I received Christina’s request for it last night in an email reading, in its entirety, “So, I need a rec letter by tomorrow at 11am. Whatever you can do.” I thought about those lines, and indeed about what I could do, and decided to write.

Christina has made herself conspicuous in my class all semester. She is reliably fifteen to thirty minutes late. When she does arrive, it is with a great disruptive heaving of belongings, inexplicable switching off or on of the classroom lights, and several loud sighs. She frequently spends what time she is in class talking to classmates, though this is to be expected after she gave me fair warning during our first week: “I’m a total chatterbox; I just can’t shut up! So I’ll be the one in the back talking all the time.” She has delivered on this promise.

Christina suffers from a dangerously high level of self-esteem and a deep conviction that she is extremely cute and endearing in her foibles. She is also convinced that she is a very shrewd and keen student held back only by unfortunate circumstance. I maintain that Christina is an unfortunate circumstance.

I understand that she is applying to your veterinary technician program. When I consider that the life of the slenderest, quivering nematode might someday lie in her hands, I feel a compulsion to bar her entry to your buildings with my physical person.

I do not suffer fools gladly, and though I am writing this at 1am in order to meet Christina’s deadline in a scant few hours, I felt it my duty to provide this letter so that you might not need to suffer this particular fool at all.

Should you have any questions, I would be delighted to speak with you in further detail about Christina’s candidacy. I would find it deeply cathartic.

Sincerely,

Sarah Courchesne

Adjunct Instructor in Biology and Animal Science

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