Tally Ho!

So Far, So Good

I STILL GET EXCITED about walking into class that first day. I do. So far, so good. My classes are full. Some students have already left but have been replaced with eager petitioners. My students are reading (they have no choice—for the ones without books, I photocopied the first week's assignments), raising their hands with questions, smiling, meeting my eyes, signaling that they are with me, here for the long haul.

Then Again

On the other hand, the administrative hand, there are problems. The first grade grievance of the season. The summer schedule. The fall schedule. But the one issue that keeps me up at night—really—has to do with low-enrolled classes. A handful of the developmental writing sections are inexplicably low. I believe we have discovered the primary reason: in the print schedule and, more importantly, on the online schedule, the classes are not listed where they should be listed—under Basic Writing. Instead, these sections are under College Writing.

This isn't so bad when one looks at the catalog because the classes are all there together on the same physical page—but when one looks online under Basic Writing, only three sections of a more rudimentary course (WR 301) appear – and nothing else. The students can only discover the Basic Writing WR 201 class if they happen to peruse College Writing classes.

Why would developmental writing students look up classes they aren't qualified to take in order to locate classes they are qualified to take?

They wouldn't.

The result? Low-enrolled classes threatened with cancellation.

The chair (moi!) should have noticed this glitch while proofing the catalog but I didn't. I was too busy making sure the right staff person was matched with the right section and that all the classes that I scheduled appeared.

It didn't occur to me that a whole raft of classes could sail over and dock in another place entirely. How did this happen? I chatted with the VP of Instruction today and we did some detective work only to discover that the error was first made last fall and went undetected until now.

Tuesday: "Teacher, what is 'tally ho'?"

Walking back from my Tuesday afternoon class, I was chatting with a hopeful petitioner when I lost my words. A young man had caught my eye and as they say, I was flabbergasted. (Now, there's a word this English instructor doesn't often use!) His chest was broad and he was walking with a purposeful have-to-get-to-my-class stride. But what caught my eye and stole my words and flabbered my gast was the image on his t-shirt: a rifle sight with a human figure in its center. I couldn't decipher all the words printed on the shirt because I was so busy trying to simply keep walking, one foot in front of the other. But I remember some of them: STOP—CLOSE THE BORDER—IMMIGRATION.

I kept seeing the rifle sight and the human figure at its heart.

I don't know if the student at my side even noticed my discomfort, my sudden loss of speech. It didn't last long, just long enough to walk across the B-Quad.

Later that day, as evening came on, I met some colleagues and my husband at the Bowers Museum in nearby Santa Ana. Gary Soto was reading and even though it was a Tuesday night and the first week of the semester and we were wiped out, we kept telling each other that we needed to go, that if we went we wouldn't regret it. We never do, we told each other. We were right.

Years ago, we hosted Soto at the college a couple times and he did what he does best: read his work yes, those wise, funny poems full of wonder. But even more importantly, he met our students and spoke to them about where they were, where they came from and where they hope to go. I use his work every semester and it never fails. The students who don't read anything else come to class having read him. They raise their hands. They talk. They write.

That night, the crowd was small, the room large. He asked everyone to move up close and they did; middle-aged folks like us, a few families with kids, young students. He read something for everyone, selections from his collections Junior College and A Natural Man . He even read from a few love poems from a young adult collection in progress. There was something for everybody. For me, it was the first poem he read, about teaching English as a Second Language, about his students and how they learn and another about the desire to wear a mariachi suit.

As he read, I thought about the kid in his t-shirt, the rifle sight image, what it means to get up in the morning and put that over your head and walk into the world filled with people who see the t-shirt and see themselves or someone they know. I remembered the homemade sign on a blue tarp that appeared on the overpass of a local freeway last April. It read: Deport Them or We Shoot Them.


The pronoun reference was not unclear.

I thought then how much time it had taken the people (there must have been at least 2 or 3) to design it, paint it and hang it. They must have worked on the phrasing, choosing the word with care, deciding which words were going to be large (DEPORT and SHOOT) and which ones small.

What do you do? What do you say? On Tuesday it helped to be with friends and hear a fine poet devoted to community, to art, to empowerment.

But it's not enough.

Adelante, indeed. Tally ho.

Finally

Among the items adding a certain industrial ambiance to our A-200 lounge is the A-200 printer, a small workhorse of a machine around which staff and faculty are often seen gathered as they wait for their jobs to be printed.

The machine complies or it doesn't. Someone prints a massive job, page after page and hides, shamed suddenly at its size while others wait. The paper is full or it isn't. The tray is shut or it is open. Then this week, Tray #2 was disappeared, leaving a gaping hole.

Truth be said, Tray #2 was always tempermental, throwing the other trays off somehow, but still, I miss it.