Mission From God -- Part 2

You and I have an absolute responsibility to transform America...through the power of our love.

--James Meredith: Mission From God, p.244

 



With Community College teachers, it's personal -- in a way few other college teachers can appreciate.  A pioneer in teaching Development Reading and English, whose name now escapes me, once wrote: The teacher of Developmental English will know heights of elation and depths of despair that no other teacher will ever know. 

 

Most college teachers will give a mid-term and a final; either the student gets it, or he doesn't.  During my years as a teaching assistant doing graduate work at UNO, I found the lack of compassion for students appalling: "if you can't do the work, you don't belong here" was the prevailing attitude.  In Composition class, even for foreign students, the rule was "on the third mistake, we stop reading."  Yes, it saved the teachers a lot of tedium, but to consign a student to another costly semester of struggle on the third mistake was unconscionable to me, especially when the paper had to be written under the pressure of a final exam.  It took me two semesters to finally say to my supervisor, "I will no longer do this to students!"

 

Fortunately, I knew my mission was the Community College--that's why I returned to graduate school, to prepare myself to teach students who did not know how to learn -- and, as I quickly realized, I did not know how to teach them.  In order to pass even the lowest level of Developmental English, one needs to be able at the least to punctuate a sentence, a skill that my students somehow had never acquired during all their years of education in New Orleans. 

 

Preparing them for the competency exam became an everyday, personal engagement, one that had to be entered into with passion and with love.  Discouragement on my part and theirs was never an option.  "Stay with me," I promised them; "We'll get through this together."  "I can get you there, but you'll have to stay with me til the end; you'll have to keep doing the work until it sticks -- day in and day out.  Don't worry about grades; worry about acquiring the skills, and the grades will take care of themselves.  You must read every day to train your brain, and you must write every day to hone your skill.  Don't give up...don't give up....don't give up."

 

Each student needs individual support, as their areas of difficulty differ.  Philip was a young police officer whose smile would light up a room.  He had life experience; he had something to say, and he had insights to teach -- all great strenths for a writer -- but unless he could learn to put periods at the end of his sentences, I knew that he would not be able to exit Developmental English.  I taught him a method that most students do not have the patience to use -- to write his paper fast (which, fortunately, he could do), and then to distance himself from the ideas in order to read it out loud and listen to it, one sentence at a time.  I taught him to look for the first period on the page before he read it aloud, and to darken the period so that he would not read past it until his ears -- not his eyes -- told him it sounded like a whole sentence. 

 

Philip deserved not only to pass Developmental English, but to earn a college degree.  He had everything else going for him except writing skills -- but I was afraid that would be his Waterloo.  The day his exam was graded (by other teachers in the department), I held my breath.  To my utter surprise and elation, he passed!  I went to find his paper -- and there, every single period had been darkened.  Philip went on to pass D.E. level 2 and then English 101 and 102, and eventually, to earn an Associate Degree.  The day he and other of my beginning students walked across that stage to grasp their diplomas, I cried --- each and every time. 

 

With Community College teachers, it's always personal -- personal victory, personal failure.  With us, it's not a career; it's a mission from God, and it's done with love -- not soft love, but tough love, love that demands responsibility from the student, but love that gives support for the task at hand.

 

James Meredith says in his book that he now knows his "mission from God" was not finished the day he enrolled and studied at the University of Mississippi.  As an old man, now in his eighties, he knows that civil rights -- the right to enter any college in the United States -- was only the beginning for the Black man and woman.  His goal for 40 years had been to break the legal and official system of white supremacy in Mississippi so that black Americans could become anything they were capable of in this country.  But there is still what he calls "a final chapter of my mission from God."  He says that the Civil Rights Movement, while achieving most of its goals of removing barriers, "failed utterly in uplifting America's poor:

 

At the root of our problems as a nation is the fact that our public education system is an unmitigated disaster for many of our poor white, Latino, Native American, and black youths.  By the time they reach twelfth grade, black students are four years behind their white peers in English, math, and science, and score two hundred points lower average SAT scores than white students....almost 80% of white students in America complete high school, compared to about 56% of black students.  If black students get to college, they are half as likely to graduate as whites.  Millions of young black Americans cannot be competitive in the new global information economy because of their inability to read, write, and spell proper English (p. 247-248).

 

The final chapter in Meredith's Mission is to challenge every American to embrace the challenge of doing something to support our children in public schools.  Equal access is important, but equal success still remains out of reach for many black students.  For me, and for my colleagues, that is the mission of a community college: equal support and success for every student who wants it.

The day I stand before God to give an account of my life, this will be my only defense and explanation:  Sir, I taught at a Community College, and I did it with love!