Rosie Goes to School

            When I was finishing Back to School, a book about people seeking a GED or entering an occupational or academic program at a community college, I imagined what it would have been like if my mother, Rosie, had been able to go back to school.

            Rose Emily Meraglio Rose, like so many poor immigrant women of her generation, was taken out of school in the seventh grade to help her mother care for her younger siblings. Though I never heard her speak ill of her mother, my grandmother, life in the Meraglio household was terribly hard on Rosie, laborious and oppressive. She eventually moved to Los Angeles with my father, took care of him as his health failed, and waited tables to support us. After my father died, my mother eventually remarried, and my stepfather had a union job that enabled her to live the rest of her life in relative security and comfort.

            Rosie was shrewd, masterful with people, and endlessly curious about psychology and human behavior. I often wondered what might have happened if she could have stayed in school—or been able to go back. I talked about it with friends of mine who knew her well. We imagined her as a social worker or counselor working with young people. She would have been a natural.

            So there I was, wrapping up Back to School, and one afternoon I let fancy take over and wrote a short sketch about my mother. I offer it simply to honor her—and all the newer incarnations of Rosie.

            It is early in the morning at the local community college. Somewhere in the distance a church bell rings. Students are coming in from the commuter train and a few line up at food trucks. A young woman walks by me cradling a cup of coffee; she takes a sip and lets out a low sigh of comfort. I have spoken with a number of women here who remind me of my mother. They’re the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. They live in crowded households, work in the afternoon or evening, care for younger siblings or nieces and nephews, are wrapped up in demands and worry.

            I imagine Rosie in a place like this. Coming back to school in her twenties, nervous, unsure, but feeling the rush of excitement, a new beginning. Would she enroll in the culinary program? Or child development? Or maybe psychology—her fascination—with hopes of becoming a counselor or social worker? What would have been possible for her? I take the stairs to the second floor of the Humanities Building and sit in the back row of the Freshman English course. Students are coming in both doors, filling up the room. I picture Rosie in the front row. She tentatively looks around, smiles at the woman taking the seat next to her, reaches into the bag she’s holding and pulls out a notebook. She opens it, lays it flat in front of her, and runs her hand over the smooth white paper.

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Teaching As a Way of Seeing

             “The thing I love about Ms. Marovich,” says Hazel of her automotive technology instructor, “is that when she looks at you, she sees the finished product.” What a remarkable kind of seeing Hazel describes: An act of perception that envisions growth and that helps make that growth possible.

            Over the past several years, I have been interviewing a wide range of people, from students in high school and community college to professionals in their fifties and sixties, about experiences in or out of school that had a transformative effect on their education, that changed the way they thought about school and what school could enable them to do with their lives. A number of the people I talked to used some variation of Hazel’s statement about seeing, some visual metaphor of validation.

            A student in a Licensed Practical Nursing Program praises an instructor she would go to when she felt overwhelmed. The instructor told her that “she could see it in me that I was meant to do this,” and encouraged her to not only complete the LPN program but to continue toward a Registered Nurse’s degree, which she did.

            “I was a strange kid,” a high school English teacher says reflecting back on his time in twelfth grade, “but not to [his English teacher] Mrs. Howard. She saw me the way I wanted to be seen. It changed my life. Every day I work to see kids the way they want to be seen.”

            A middle school teacher starts talking to a boy serving detention and senses a “hunger” that leads her to invite him onto the school’s fledgling debate team. When I ask how she senses that hunger, she says, “by talking to someone and answering their questions. You can see it in their eyes.”

            A high school Spanish teacher raises the issue of college to a junior whose energies are more invested in soccer than academics, but who has a way with people and exhibits a certain savvy as he navigates eleventh grade. The teacher follows his instincts and connects the young man to a college bridge program. Looking back on it, our soccer player, now a graduate student, says of that teacher, “He saw potential in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

            These teachers seem to operate with an expansive sense of human ability and are particularly alert to signs of that ability, signs that might be faint or blurred by societal biases or by a student’s reticence or distracting behavior—or that the student him or herself might barely comprehend. Through the way they teach, through mentoring, or through some other intervention, these teachers help develop the abilities they perceive. We don’t hear a lot about this powerfully humane element of teaching, for so much current discussion of teacher education and development is focused elsewhere: from creating measures of effectiveness to mastering district or state curriculum frameworks. These are important issues to be sure, but they have crowded out so much else that makes teaching a richly humanistic intellectual pursuit.

            One last thought. To repurpose a phrase of Walt Whitman’s, education contains multitudes. There are endless treasures of human experience to be found within the classroom, so we could fruitfully continue the present discussion inside the schoolhouse alone. But given our moment in history, it’s not much of a stretch to think of how the kind of affirming perception I’ve been discussing resonates beyond education with current social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, movements challenging perceptions that dehumanize rather than affirm. Also relevant is the portrayal of refugees and immigrants promulgated by the Trump administration, converting demonizing perception into heartless public policy. In times like these, perception attuned to ability along with a commitment to foster that ability becomes not only an educational endeavor but a civic and moral one as well.

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