We are fortunate to be living in a time of multicultural awareness. But what does that actually mean? Are cultural identities immutable? How does a new culture affect us? Can we really understand the culture of another person? Do we ask our students to give up values, traditions, dreams in order to fit into the U.S.? How do we actually help our students articulate their deepest thoughts and needs? Brazilian educator, writer, and activist Paolo Freire, who had such a progressive influence on English teaching and other disciplines, has urged us to involve our students, not impose our culture, but to nurture them, be equals with them, appreciate their context. Who can argue with that? To put this into practice we ourselves must be constantly critical of our world and ourselves. Believing in our students, expecting the best may help them more than anything.
I think of my adult ESL students and how powerless they must feel in our society. Some do not have legal documentation for residency, some have to struggle so hard with the language, some can’t keep a job, some feel emotionally overwhelmed, and some are traumatized. They come to a classroom setting, familiar to us but not them, and again they feel they don’t belong. If a student is gay or transgender, or a son or daughter or mother or father is, this is a further complication in his/her life. If she is ashamed of her religion, if he is uncomfortable about expressing his political views, he or she cannot relax. We all want to be accepted and appreciated for who we are. And students have such enormous resources of knowledge and know-how within and among themselves. Sharing experiences and learning about each other’s cultures can be so affirming.
Eva Hoffman makes a relevant analogy: “You can’t transport human meanings whole from one culture to another any more than you can transliterate a text.” The feelings of our students as they go through the process of learning English and acculturating are not easily revealed either. They have complicated lives and difficulties beyond our comprehension. Many of my adult ESL students, for example, say they have come to the U.S. for freedom. Do they really feel free here? Many have come to escape war or oppression. What have they left behind?
At City College of San Francisco, I taught a beginning ESL class at the time of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo. I had a few Bosnian students in my class, as well as students from Vietnam, Guatemala, Mexico, the Middle East, China, South America, and other regions. I did not hear any approval of U.S. and NATO roles in this war. I heard about the pain that war had caused in some of the students’ lives, and I heard surprise at U.S. actions. That semester, the students were journaling once a week. Although limited in their language, many were able to respond to the war on paper. One student wrote of her hopes and how nurturing the positive qualities in one another can repair the damage of war. She had found a way to write a profound and useful response with her limited English. Other students also wrote what they couldn’t express in class. Writing organizes thoughts. Students gain confidence in their abilities to communicate, especially if errors are not the focus.
Teachers do not give students the gift of language, they find it themselves. We give them opportunities. Trying to understand their thoughts, experiences, and cultures is a way of giving them an opening to communicate with us. Cultural practices and backward ideas can be discussed and opinions shared. I also share my own struggle with language with them when appropriate. I tell them I was transformed by becoming who I am—a lesbian, a writer, an activist, a teacher. As their teacher I try to show them how crucial language is.
We learn by asking our own questions, solving problems, clarifying feelings and experiences in language. We cannot remind one another of this often enough. In James Baldwin’s words: “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.”
Can Factory Sonnets
Karen must have snorted a line. And she’s smoking pot again. She is in another world, avoiding me. I’ve told her before I can’t deal with her in that space, but no, she keeps doing it. She may have lost interest in me anyway, for all I know. I want to say something. I just can’t stay in this threesome much longer. I am so sick and tired of Linda and her drunken stupors. It’s time for me to bail out, but I feel lured, fooled. Those girlfriends need me and I need them. I just can’t let go.
The noise was unbearable in that can factory. It was like jackhammers but more metallic and hollow. Constant clamor of machinery and can tops. Management’s drive was to keep the place going one hundred per cent, all the time. Monotonous assembly-line work, deadening to the human spirit. Continental Can intended to get the most out of their new technology, so there was no stopping the job consolidation that was underway. Fewer workers meant fewer human variables. I knew management’s psychology.
My poor feet! Some people get headaches, some people get back pain. My stress went right to my feet. Working all night, standing up, was pure torture. I ached all over when my feet hurt. The effort of staying up all night and tolerating the pain in my body felt like an act of survival during that long year of employment at the can plant. To this day I can’t believe I stayed so long. The pay wasn’t even that good.
It was Karen’s kisses that held me like a spider web. I was suspended in time, endlessly wrapped up in her thin, sticky threads. Those long dangerous, mushy smooches in the green restroom at work, up against the wall, in that tingly, exhausted state of fighting sleep, when we were desperate. She took me by the waist and wrapped her arms around me while I weakly said, “Not here.” She kept in step with me as we waltzed across the gray cement floor in our steel-toed boots and I melted. Her firm lips came down on mine—she was taller than me, and I’m five foot nine. I curled into her soft breasts like I had nowhere else to go.
She listened for the door as I let my body rest against the wall. No one ever walked in on us, but there were several close calls. We were saved by the divider that jutted out in front of the door to safeguard “women’s privacy,” said one of the men. The seconds we had after we heard Bessie or Pat or someone else swing the door open did not wipe away our sweet blushes, though we tried to be cool. They walked in, talking, tired, their heads hanging down. They didn’t pay much attention to us.
I met Karen at the Continental Can plant in Edison, New Jersey in 1986, where I got a job as a production worker even though I was a journeyman machinist. Human Resources promised to promote me to technician if I proved capable enough. The techs were all men and the production workers were almost all women. Our job was to pack the can lids stamped out by the machines and load them onto pallets. It didn’t take much skill. The techs had to keep their assigned machines running and make sure they were churning out quality lids. I had been a machinist for four years at an aircraft repair facility and four years before that in various production shops, including CNC (computerized machinery) building M-1 tanks at FMC. I was more qualified to handle one of the higher-paying tech jobs one of the higher paying tech jobs at Continental Can than some of the men who got hired, but the dyke personnel director wanted me to prove myself. It was always that way, but getting shafted by a sister just proved once again it didn’t matter that a woman was in charge.