Literacy Learning and Educational Pederasty, part 1

Jenifer commented in one of our emails “Somebody’s been going to night school.” It is a shared recognition, given back and forth, that one of us has done some credible thinking, talking, or writing that reveals itself as an object of admiration in the other. Of course, true to style of our interaction, it is delivered in a sarcastic, perhaps “I wish I had thought that” way. It is like candy to me. It echoes the crazy terrain of my childhood relationships with my sibs. But what a night school! The best part about being here so far is that I can't take anything for granted.  Even you, if I don't respond to your email, I may not get one back. So in a good way, it keeps me on my toes.  I guess that is what is supposed to happen.

OK, so we just got back from the white, rich side of town. First trip there since we've been in SA. Very beautiful, ocean-front, big waves, surfers just off shore in front of the condos. One street back, Jewish NY style delis, white people buying groceries, black people manning the check out lines. [Interestingly, there is a sizable Jewish population in CT. Who knew? Yesterday, we saw several shops offering Judaica.] OMG, we found a different world. In some ways it would have been more comfortable for us to be living near the beach in the “Florida-like” costal community, rather than in UCT staff housing we are in. Our locale is much downscale, but we are not suffering by any means. Though in a loud, rough neighborhood, we are enclosed behind metal fencing and have 24-hour guards at the front gate. Richard, who is raised in a city environment, takes all of this in and becomes wary, worried that one of us will be the next target, or perhaps the next murder victim in this neighborhood that averages 5 or 6 murders per year. I am told that the victims are often (?) university students at UCT on their way back to their apartments after partying. When they refuse to surrender their money and/or valuables, they are killed.

Coming into the culture this way may be better in some ways, though. When I go through the flats (poor black shacks made of corrugated tin) on the way to UWC, it makes me aware that going to uni for these kids is a real life changer, it they can get there. Hmmm, going back, how is this same/different than it was for me? I was the first in my family to be a university student, but I knew nothing other than distrust. My mom worked as a payroll clerk at the Central Michigan University. And of course there was the “town and gown” conflict that was situated right within her office. The extent to which my mom had any significant interaction with academics, or at least my engagement with that situation, was the negative stories about what “pompous asses” professor were. In my high school years, my dad took a chemistry course, and then a physics course at CMU for job advancement at Leonard Refinary. His project for physics was the relative density of the distillates as they were successively boiled off the crude. The crude was included at the bottom of a distillate stack, with each of the different products siphoned off as they decreased in density as they rose up the stack. I had been born into these stacks, towering like my neigborhood’s version of high rises, and communally griping when “Leonard was brewing skunk juice.” So, my connection with the uni culture was to be dismissive. This has much to do with how I am a professor. I purposefully do not assume the mantle, for fear that I would be perceived as a “pompous ass.” It also makes me painfully aware of how I think about staff members, and how they may be perceiving me. It seems a little “Upstairs, downstairs when I consider it in these narrative ways. So if the staff is there to keep things going so that the professors can keep things going, it is really more reciprocal. We benefit from each other. So I may understand some of the shifting that is required for students to go to school here, but it is a matter of degree of difference. I want to know how schools get students on a track of uni., who gets to go, how is the selection made. These are different specific questions than I came here to study, but I think that they must form the backdrop to what happens in the teacher prep classes I am observing.

So, I'm in an undergraduate class, linguistics for both linguistic majors and for elementary teachers. I thought with all my “high-minded-save-the-marginalized-through-higher-ed,” that the students would be more serious, that it would somehow matter more. Instead, the students were working on unrelated laptop tasks, chatting back and forth, working cell phones, all while Dimitri, whom I came to watch teach, plowed through someone else's PowerPoint on emergent literacy.  I guess we can count on UG to be UG universally. While I was talking with Dimitri, the doctoral student at UWC, about the lecture he had given on emergent literacy, I was very physically reminded of the adult that had made such a difference in my literacy development, with chills on my arms. Simultaneously, one of the doctoral students at USF, Anne, had emailed me about an observation  based on my blog, that kids don’t become literate without the close involvement of an adult. This makes great sense, since literacy is a cultural tool and must be learned in an apprenticeship mode. While I had learned to decode and was good at what counted as “literacy” in school, I was not a reader by any means. I had not had that relationship with an adult through the literacy. When Dimitri, the doctoral student at UWC, asked how I had become literate when my parents didn't participate in such stuff with me and siblings, I was reminded of the chemistry professor, Ken Uglum, who rented my parents' upstairs apartment. From the time I was in the 6th grade until his death (after I was already a "prof"), he was a constant intellectual parent. I got chills when I was telling Dimitri about my relationship with Ken. All of this is not to devalue my parents’ and their parenting. They both read, but for different reasons than did Ken when he read with me. My folks created literacy oases for themselves, as a way to escape 6 carping children in a very small living space. My dad would get behind the newspaper and disappear from the room. My mom read libraries of romance novels, and wrote long letters to her Mother, who lived 4 states away, both as escapes from the present. What they were unable to do, or did not know to do, was to engage their kids in reading with them. I am reminded of Heath’s study of Roadville parents. Good people, literate in their own lives, but not scaffolding of their own kids’ literacy. Interestingly, the talk with Dimitri was after I had watched him teach a lesson on emergent literacy to a group of undergrads who couldn't have cared less about what he was teaching. Sigh!

How does Dimitri become that adult for all of these young adults? How are they moved to become “that adult” for their students? What was Ken’s motivation for taking me on? What are the configurations of care that make space for the development of literacy tools and habits? And why, when I so distrust the Noddings’s invocation of compulsory care for teachers, do I automatically reference it as a framework for the grafting of literacy onto a child’s engagement with learning the world. What are the other relationships are available for the considerable, mutual time and energy that subtend the development of literacy?

First of all, the previous paragraph is an example of what Stockton calls lateralizing, the sideways fattening of an idea, of an argument, because the forward, developmental and teleological path is too threatening, or too scary.  So, “Fear is the mind killer, face your fear, let it wash over you, and when it has passed, only you will remain.” This from Frank Herbert’s Dune, and it still works.

Ken’s mentoring of me was always based on what I wanted. It must have been very trying for him to have expectations and see me divert from what he had planned. I became aware that I was his “special project” when, as a sixth grader, Ken and I joined a field trip with Professor Faith Johnston's college botany class to a local green house that had grown citrus indoors, protected from the Michigan winter freezes. One of the students looked at me and said “So, your Jimmie.” the student was also enrolled in Ken's physical chemistry class, and had heard "the tales of Jimmie." I remember being embarrassed to be called out. Even then, even with Ken’s exquisitely crafted approach to my development, even with my parents’ approval, I knew that Ken’s pederastic pleasure was not OK, or I would not have been embarrassed. After his death, when my dad was cleaning out Ken’s stuff from the upstairs apartment, he discovered Ken’s collection of “art books” of naked little boys. Dad shared his discovery with my mom, who tentatively asked during my next visit home if I knew about this. With some self-protective bravado, I said that I did, but didn’t think it was anybody’s business. I had discovered these books as an adolescent while cleaning. Since I was dealing with my own sexual orientation (an emerging, though closeted, homosexual), and since Ken's pedophilic desire was for males, I conflated the two orientations toward desire. So in covering for Ken, I was also covering for myself. In any case, Ken was not hiding his desire for young boys. Nor was he overtly sexual in his behavior, at least toward me. Rather, in the classic pedophilic relation, he assumed responsibility for my “development.”  His work (his pleasure?) was in mentoring me. And I am part, a willing part, of this relationship. Every Saturday, I took the trip up the stairs to Ken’s world, which is reconstructed on Saturday’s as “Jim’s world.” Each Saturday was “our special time.” When Ken was well, healthy, there were extensive, well organized learning contexts. Several were given over to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with interludes where Ken would explain, introduce, interpret what was to me incomprehensible, opera. Yet, he persisted. So it was with making cloud chambers to watch positrons zing across the CO2 vapors we created with dry ice. When a certain meteor shower failed to show, we took consolation in looking at Saturn's rings with an antique heavy, brass telescope, dragged to the roof of the "old science building" at CMU. Each meeting was a softly structured learning opportunity, and depending upon my attitude, interest, and perceived payoff, I was present, even engaged.

An interesting nexus, his knowing and teaching, and my frequent resisting what was I perceived as uninteresting. The masochism of teaching comes to mind. "I don’t want this thing, but I hang in there because of some other relationship-based pay-off." Similarly, the teacher, temporarily in control, but only to the extent that current agenda is pushed on a masochistic student. But the teacher is also in such a role, suspending the desires of self, to promote the student. This is self-effacing, self-denial so that the student may be whipped into shape.