Soldiers in the Classroom Redux

On June 11^th, NPR aired a story on the more than half a million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts who are attending college. Host Melissa Block reported that “some veterans say the transition is like landing on another planet” and that “college staffs are having trouble adapting, too.”

            The story featured Sierra Community College in Northern California and the laudable efforts of one counselor, a former Marine herself, to establish support services for the college’s 800 veterans. Click here for the NPR story.

            Several years ago, I wrote about a program for returning Vietnam vets that I taught in as a young man. Looking back on it, I think the program offered a remarkable model that should be replicated today – though as the NPR story made clear, the awful budgetary conditions in most colleges make such replication unlikely. Still, if you’ll indulge me, I would like to reprint this post, originally from November, 2009. It seems especially timely today.

* * *

            What the classroom full of veterans wanted most was, as one of them put it, “to help our families understand what we went through.”  The course was in communication, and it was part of an educational program for veterans of the Vietnam war.  The teacher – my colleague in the federally funded program – had asked them what they most wanted to learn, and that was their primary answer: to explain to those closest to them the hell they endured. 

            Our newest generation of veterans are returning to a warmer welcome than those who served in Vietnam, but the kind of war they fought is similar, and their needs are as great.  By one count, over 30,000 are injured, some severely.  (And this number doesn’t include, or significantly undercounts, traumatic brain injuries.) Others are or will be torn apart by psychological trauma.  And many others will experience terrible distress as they try to find their way with family and community, the economy and education. 

What kind of support is our society providing for them?  As a young man, I taught English in that program for Vietnam vets, so I got a sense of life after service is over, after physical wounds are healed, after the ceremonies – if there were any – and handshakes have receded into memory.  Then soldiers have their lives to pick up or to create anew.

            Advocates for veterans have brought to public attention the inadequate funding and delivery of health care for newer generations of veterans; less public until the deliberations preceding the new GI Bill were the limited resources for education and the many problems young veterans face as they try to reenter school.  The rising cost of living combined with rising costs of tuition, textbooks, and supplies dash many hopes, but even those who can make it financially typically face significant academic and social problems.

            The program that contained the communication class could serve as a model for how to help the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortunately, a number of colleges are responding to this new generation of veterans with a range of support services: financial aid assistance, counseling, orientation programs, and social clubs. These are valuable resources. But my sense is that returning soldiers would be better served through a program that includes significant course work as well as services. One such effort is the laudable SERV (Supportive Education for the Returning Veteran) program at Cleveland State. But there are few others. The programs I’d like to see could run through some part of the first year (as SERV does) or could function as a preparatory or bridge program that precedes but is linked to further matriculation.

            The key idea is to treat a complex educational issue in a comprehensive and integrated way. To respond adequately to educational needs, the program has to address psychological, social, and economic needs as well. And, hand in glove, some social and psychological problems – inability to concentrate, feelings of intellectual inadequacy – don’t fully manifest themselves unless one is in a classroom, immersed in English or math or poly sci.            

           

            The Veterans Special Education Program was a twelve-week crash course in college preparation.  The veterans called it academic boot camp.  The curriculum included representative freshman year courses in English, psychology, communications, and mathematics, so students got a sense of what lay before them – a reality check – and were able to begin college with some credits, a leg up.  The courses also addressed fundamental cognitive and social skills: critical writing and reading, mathematics, human relations, and communication. 

            The courses were supported with tutoring.  A number of the veterans had poor academic backgrounds, so some needed a good deal of assistance with their writing, with reading academic material, or with all the strategies for doing well in school: managing time, note taking, studying for exams.  But the tutoring also made the academic work more humane, no small thing, for many of the students carried with them a history of insecurity and anger about matters academic. 

            They were being asked to write essays analyzing poetry or comparing sociological or psychological theories and to read more carefully and critically than they had before.  The challenge stirred strong feeling.  Some of the students shut down and withdrew and others erupted.  One marine scout I was working with got so frustrated that, in a blur of rage and laughter, he bit off the corner of his paper before handing it to me.

            It wasn’t enough for us to do our work within the confines of the classroom.  The staff would follow up when a student missed a few days, making phone calls, driving over to an apartment or hotel room, finding someone in awful shape.  We had a rich network of referrals for psychological counseling – the nearby V.A. hospitals but also local agencies and civic organizations. And for those who needed it, we had referrals for financial counseling as well. Finally, the program included advising to assist the students in selecting and applying to appropriate colleges and universities.  With help from our counselor, the fellow who sank his teeth into that essay got into UCLA, majoring in Sociology and East Asian Studies.

            All this created a sense of community, something the veterans often noted.  For all their social and political differences, they shared the war, and now they were preparing for reentry into the world they left behind.  The staff put on social events, but the real community, I believe, was formed through a course of study that was intensive, generous with assistance, and geared toward the next phase of the veterans’ lives. 

            We have been awash with “support our troops” rhetoric and told to always “thank veterans for their service.” Politicians use such language as a patriotic trump card.  One grand irony in all this is the shameful level of health and psychological care some veterans have been getting and the resistance a number of conservatives and the Pentagon itself displayed a few years ago during legislative deliberations for a new G.I. Bill.

Rather than patriotic talk, I’d like to hear about programs that are comprehensive and address the multiple needs our troops have when they return home.  Programs that provide knowledge and build skill.  Programs that are thick with human contact.  Programs that meet veterans where they are and provide structure and guidance that assist them toward a clear goal.  Programs that build a community while leading these young men and women back to their own communities. 

Educational programs for special populations tend toward single-shot solutions: a few basic skills courses, or tutoring, or counseling.  But the best programs work on multiple levels, integrate a number of interventions.  Such programs emerge from an understanding of the multiple barriers faced by their participants, but also from an affirmation of the potential of those participants.  The richness of the program matches the perception of the capacity of the people who populate it.

            This is how really to support our troops. And it is how we should think about an education that, of necessity, has to go beyond the classroom.

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High School Reunion

            In my last post, I wrote about the current Teacher of the Year, Rebecca Mieliwocki. Ms. Mieliwocki is in the midst of her career, affecting the lives of students here and now. This week I’m writing about the influence of a teacher long past the time when that teacher’s work is done. It’s the kind of influence teachers hope to have.

            This post is a bit of a shaggy dog story, but I promise it has a punch line, maybe several.

            My high school class hasn’t been big on reunions, but it did just have one, the only one in decades. I wasn’t able to go, but if I could have, I might not have attended anyway. High school was not such a great time for me, and though by the time I graduated I had a close circle of buddies and, as well, had a few pals who were in the cool crowd, I felt pretty adrift until my senior year when I had the unbelievable luck of landing in Jack McFarland’s English class, the class that turned my life around. I remained close to those friends – though several have died – and I am still in touch with Mr. McFarland. Those connections aside, I have no desire to relive my high school days, all those feelings of anchorless yearning.

            I had heard through the grapevine about the reunion before I got the form letter announcing it. The letter was from Denny Grace, a guy who lettered in three sports and dated the homecoming queen. I knew Denny in high school –we were both in Mr. McFarland’s English class – but I doubt that we ever exchanged more than a few words in passing. Denny was a big deal, and I was, well, not on the fringes by my senior year, but certainly not in the high school groove. Once we graduated, I don’t believe I saw Denny again.

            At the bottom of that form letter, right under Denny’s signature, he wrote a sentence saying he had read one of my books and really liked it.  I stood there in my kitchen, looking at that eleven word sentence, surprised, touched, a little disoriented. I could picture Denny clearly. He sat three or four rows over from me in McFarland’s class, and the image I had was of the beginning of class, Denny in his long letterman’s sweater, laughing as he curled into his seat, big as life. And here he is now writing to me about something I wrote?! I felt like I was in a John Hughes movie.

            I remembered that Denny’s father owned a small construction company and was pretty sure that Denny worked for him. So a few days after receiving the letter, I wrote a letter back, explaining that I couldn’t come to the reunion and telling him how pleased I was that he liked the book. I mentioned the construction work and included with the letter a copy of my book on the cognition involved in a blue- collar and service work, The Mind at Work. A short time later I got a hand written letter from Denny in return commenting on the book:

I was in construction my entire life, and if you ever watched a tile setter tile a kitchen or see a finish carpenter hang a door or watch a carpenter cut roof joists, you would have a whole new outlook on what talent and smarts it takes to do those jobs.

After a billion years, Denny Grace and I, two people who led such different lives in high school, were forming a connection around reading. And here is where this digressive tale begins to set up its punch line.

Before Mr. McFarland’s class, Denny was not much of a reader, and though he certainly was an able student, he was, by his own admission, more emotionally invested in sports rather than academics. But McFarland caught his attention. The class, Denny wrote, “was the best class with the best teacher I ever had.” And the readings got him wondering about other books and authors, so, for the first time in his young life, he went to the public library and checked out a book – Tortilla Flat. The library “was a strange, new world,” and he was hooked.” I’ve have never been without a book since then. Roaming through bookstores is like being on a treasure hunt.”

I set up a phone call so that Denny could tell all this to his former teacher. They had a long and, from what I heard later, engaging conversation. As I write this, Mr. McFarland is compiling a reading list for Denny, based on the books they discussed.

I spoke with Mr. McFarland afterward, reflecting on the way a teacher’s influence plays out. For some in his class, his influence was evident in the moment – for example with the fellow who edited the student newspaper he supervised, or with someone like me, an aimless student who he pulled into his orbit. Teachers can point to such cases. But what about other varieties of influence? “When you teach so many classes,” McFarland mused, “there’s an awful lot of anonymity in the interaction. There’s people you don’t know you’re reaching – and sometimes they’re not aware at the time that something is being set in motion.”

He certainly set something in motion with me and with Denny Grace as well – and further set in motion a wonderful ongoing conversation between two former classmates who, thanks to Jack McFarland, now have a lot in common.


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