MOUSEBERRIES by Rebel Girl

All the PR boilerplate about student recruitment strategies makes a peevish Rebel Girl wonder just what these folks imagine they are recruiting students into, I mean aside from the obviously false surf, the moolah and the hotties.

(Peevish aside: Do I really work at an institute of higher learning which sees fit to insult our students, in particular, our female students, this way? Hotties?)

So, let’s consider, then, the actual physical conditions of our colleges. You don’t have to be a feminist Latina cartoon character-cum union activist to ask what students find when they arrive at IVC after forking over their money to attend a community college located in one of the wealthiest districts in the state, where the board has currently socked away tens of millions of dollars, some of which was used to renovate their boardroom last year in an apparent effort to resemble something like the helm of Star Trek’s Enterprise. That’s the vivid dream reality which board members experience--expensive Captain Kirk swivel chairs, electronic control panels, a gleaming golden dais (“Engage!”) and, if rumors prove true (and mostly they do around here), mighty towers of gourmet smoked meat sandwiches stacked on broad platters on newly varnished furniture arranged behind closed doors (no frozen vending machine burritos for our proud fiscal conservatives).

But what do the students experience?

Let’s examine the scene in just one classroom on a single day last week. I should say that I had begun a few weeks earlier by commenting to students that we were all lucky, very lucky this semester. Though enrollment numbers were low for this literature class, the Powers That Be had allowed us to continue. The classroom itself was newly painted--a first in my 14 years of employment. The previous year, walking into that same room suggested the act of lowering oneself into a grimy bathtub whose sides were marked by generations of dirty bathers attempting to cleanse themselves. (What does go on in these rooms?) Now the room was as sterile, barren and charmless as an operating room, but teaching is, at times, something like surgery and so, with that in mind, I slipped on my mask and gloves, and began the semester’s operation to excise ignorance and superstition, aiming to transplant into my patients a love of critical thinking, literature and the humanities after further congratulating us all on the clean walls, working clock, sturdy podium and reasonable collection of furniture in which to sit.

It all seemed a good omen. And so we began the semester.

Still, this room, despite its blindingly white walls, is no catch. It’s smaller than most classrooms and is stuck on the end of an old building famous for being turned inside out. The upshot is that we’re subject to the moans and groans and odd door slams of people we cannot see, namely, the denizens of the theater department, who inhabit the interior hallway and adjoining rooms. But over the years I have learned to take this in stride and have worked up a number of jokes that I deploy when necessary to acknowledge the interruption and move the class along. I find that teaching literature in the room gives me even more material to work with as I can invoke any number of literary references to account for the unseen opera next door: the shrieks are undoubtedly those of Poe’s unfortunate Fortunado, walled up in the catacombs; the amorous chuckles surely belong to Kate Chopin’s Calixta and Alcee; the slams of the invisible door? Why, of course, Ibsen’s Nora on her way out.

This morning in particular, deep into Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” I noticed a student looking distracted. I was reading at that moment from Ivan the narrator’s central soliloquy:

Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that as happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him--sickness, poverty, loss--and nobody will see it, just as now he neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly like the wind in the aspen tree, and all is well.

At first, I attributed the student’s roving eyes to her indifference to the great but sometimes inaccessible Russian, but then, following her eyes, I saw what she saw: a single mouse, rambling across the flat panels of fluorescent lighting fixtures, through which he (she?) was exquisitely illuminated from furry tail to pink foot pads. It was like watching the Discovery Channel. The eyes of the rest of the students then followed, with the predictable surprise and oohs and ahhs, not of delight but something else which is triggered by vector in the human cerebellum, an autochthonic revulsion which Rebel Girl has herself learned to control, but to which she sometimes succumbs in too-close proximity to administrators and Republicans.

Class stopped while we watched the critter make its confident way out of our illuminated line-of-sight, which took some time as the mouse seemed not in any hurry.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured the students, a couple of whom seemed ready to run, “it’s not heavy enough to dislodge the panel.” This sounded authoritative, even to me. “It won’t fall on you. After all, it’s not a rat. Rats are much heavier.”

I know that I am not at my best when confronted by a mouse, especially in public, but I felt like I had done a reasonable job under the circumstances, notwithstanding my complete unfamiliarity with vector zoology. I didn’t squeal. I didn’t run. I held my ground and my podium and discoursed on the relative weight of mice versus rats. Pretty good, I think.

In due time, we returned to Anton Chekhov, but somehow, the moment was different. Something had been lost when the mouse was found. It may have been a tiny moral, one as uncomfortable yet unavoidable as the rodent in its magnificent silhouette.

As a colleague’s students have recently reminded me, in their thoughtful work with Linda Barry’s fine essay, “The Sanctuary of School,”-- the physical conditions of school facilities, the available or unavailable resources--all these telegraph a message to students about how much or little they are valued, respected, supported.

Through the years, my students and I have worked hard to transcend our humble, dilapidated surroundings, knowing that our goals are greater than the places in which we toil. So we continue to write, discuss, review, argue, analyze, even as the trails of ants crisscross the ceiling, walls, floors, desk tops and yes, the white board on which I make notes. (Fun fact: Did you know that an ant will not cross a fresh marker line? It will wait until the line is fully dry. Lasso a few and see for yourself.) We carry on despite the leaking ceiling, the windows that either won’t open or close, and the air conditioning system that either freezes or roasts us or else is utterly indifferent to its purpose. When we discover broken furniture, we carry it out by ourselves so no one will be hurt--only to discover the broken furniture miraculously returned, as broken as ever. And don’t get me started (at least not right now) on the state of sanitary facilities that the college provides. I am confident that many Orange County homes have more toilets than are provided for the women frequenting A-200 (four!)--this for a building with 10 classrooms (25-45 students in each throughout the day) and at least 25 faculty offices. Additionally, our restroom extends by default its ungenerous accommodation (if you can call it that) for the nearby restroom-less A-400 (theater, several classrooms and offices). You do the math; I’m only an English major who sometimes likes to visit a restroom. My students have told me that in order to avoid the conditions they find, they will not void on campus. Perhaps this may explain student retention issues. Ha ha.

Clearly what is needed is a mouse with a hammer to knock at the doors of the satisfied trustees and administrators, to, as Chekhov advises, remind them of those others who are not-so-satisfied.

But the marketing types are busy creating an illusion of shiny high-technology, of surfers, of manicured lawns and hotties.

And the trustees and administrators would rather believe that illusion (after all, they paid for it) than what my students and I see with our own eyes on a daily basis. As another Russian, Pushkin, once said, “The lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.” --RG