CASAMURPHY

As I log-on to start writing here, Word asks me to add Intelligent Services and the brief description of this sounds creepy.  There will be a conclusive end to our legal problem within three months and with any luck much sooner.  I have a genial class of Spanish speakers, after pointing out to the counselor enrolling the students how much better it is to have a tiny bit of diversity.  My old-fashioned classroom with Golden Book Readers and big bins of magnetic plastic alphabets is a nice place to practice language, without a net, but along with other beginners.  Inevitably, the students who sit in the vicinity of a non-Spanish speaker get way more conversation practice with lowered affective filters.  There is open enrollment, and while the current composition is 100% Spanish speaking, I hope for a smattering of folks with varied mother tongues.   

Wednesday is very rainy.  The attendance is about half normal.  I note to the few stalwarts that it’s either the weather or because it’s Ash Wednesday.  With this news, a couple of them hightail it off to church.  This group has a good percentage of sophisticates.  Mariana works in the office of a very high end uber-organic line of baby skincare products.  She brings me some shampoo and lotion, pointing to “fine for adults” on the label.   Ronaldo is a lawyer in Guatemala.  He works at a downtown parking lot.  He tells me that his dad was high ranking military officer and intimates that he’s skedaddled in a hurry. 

I am still parsing my experience at the Johnston reunion, that I will now sort of grudgingly refer to the by its flakey sounding given name, “Renewal.” A panel of educators speak about the how Johnston informs their classroom process.  An alum runs a school in China and describes coping with daunting problems by “throwing Johnston” at them.

While I’ve gotten to know them through meetings and workshops, I have never really seen any of my colleagues actually teaching but for the snippet when the door between the classrooms is opened for my neighbor to keep an eye on things if I’ve OD’d on coffee and there is a bathroom emergency.  We are not permitted to allow students to remain in the room unsupervised.  I am wildly curious as to how I would compare and sometimes wonder if I’m doing the whole thing wrong. 

On the first night I give them a little questionnaire with info about me and my family and questions about themselves.  There are two vegetarians.  Most of them, except for Flavia, hate cats.  About a third don’t understand at all and just copy what I’ve written.   From the others, there’s a hairdresser, construction workers, painters, Lyft drivers and housekeepers. 

I ask my students a question every night, holding onto the door jamb so that they cannot leave the room until they speak to me.  The first question is favorite food.  Sushi.  Chinese orange chicken, pupusas, tamales, prime rib, Caesar salad.  The second is favorite movie.  Coco.  Aquaman, Fast and the Furious, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, Schindler’s List.  Arturo says that he can’t think of a movie, but he likes the HBO series The Night Of.  The Thursday prompt is to tell me three things that are important.  Mom.  Kids.   Learning English. Flavia makes it a point to tell me that her husband and son are NOT important, but she likes her job, learning English, and her cat.

We are to turn in a long-term lesson plan and as I try to incorporate all of the objectives from the course outline, I know that we will likely come up short a week.  Or two.  There are always a few nights when attendance sucks and some of them can only come once or twice a week.  I try to comfort the ones who aren’t promoted.  Most of the teachers who speak at the Renewal do not teach in a venue as rarified as Johnston.  But all, almost militantly, throw a little Johnston at their students.

The complicated funding of an adult school is hinged to a great extent on meeting benchmarks for the tests that we must frequently administer so I try to stress stuff that they’ll be tested on.  Some lack the reading and writing skills to move forward.  Others are unable to come to every class.  I want everyone to leave each night with something.  I teach to the test but design lessons with forms, advertisements and text messages of the sort they’re likely to encounter in real life.  There is always a little lesson on how they contribute to L.A. economically and culturally.  I strategize towards increasing their sense of belonging and agency.

I prepare, and Himself edits, a presentation on the eccentric English painter, Stanley Spencer for Renewal mini-courses.  Our competition is a popular professor presenting materials from a book he’s recently published about death in the digital era.  We know that it will be SRO and expect low, or even no, attendance for our little project.  We end up with and audience of two, an alum from my year and a particularly erudite professor who helped found the experimental college half a century ago.  Bill taught a course in Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence that I took during my last year of college.  I don’t think I finished Mrs. Dalloway but Sons and Lovers is vivid.  The process, at least in my day, at Johnston was to propose a graduation contract and defend it to a committee of faculty and peers.  Mine was loosey goosey.  I was in a hurry.  There were money issues, but also, I was foolishly eager to move onto the next thing.  Had I known what awaited me in the real world I likely would have eased up on the gas. 

I’m not sure how my original graduation contract slid through but when it came time to defend it for graduation, Bill was on my committee.  He immediately seized upon the lack of rigor but let it slide, sighing that while my contract lacked the depth and breadth that he’d expect from a graduate, the given the fact that I had at least displayed a modicum of intelligence, he’d let it slide. More than forty years later, our roles reversed, I am anxious that our Spencer presentation serve to reinforce the rightness of his decision to let me graduate.

Our Stanley Spencer course is extensively researched, and I think our materials are interesting and well chosen.  I feel vindicated and steeped in the Johnston ethos of lifelong learning.  I try to throw Johnston at my students and encourage their self-exploration and indulgence of curiosity and nurture what each and every one brings to the table. For all the hoops I have to jump through, the actual teaching time are the most satisfying hours of my week.

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After my Midterms high, the rest of my week has drifted back into a morass of fear and despair.  I toggle back and forth from MSNBC to CNN and check the online news about a zillion times a day.  What a hypocrite I am to encourage my students’ voracity while, but for the hours I stand before them, I can barely function.  I realize that it’s time to throw a little Johnston at myself.  Like most of my fellow travelers, I will likely have material for a dozen tomes about these times when they inevitably end.  I think that it’s important to pay attention and to remember.  However, there must be another outlet for my horror and grief.  I had no idea the midterms would turn out as well as they did.  Katie Hill, Katie Porter and Harley Rouda, three long shots I supported are all doing me proud in the House.  But November 2020 feels ages away and at my age, I think it’s sinful to wish for time to pass any more quickly than it inevitably does.   CNN and MSNBC will likely, and much to the annoyance of Himself, continue to blare but I realize that I need more sustenance than mere teaching part-time can provide.  I’m making plans to register voters and opening Casamurphy for Civic Sundays to phone-bank and write cards. It will probably seem like forever but doing whatever I can in support of democracy will make the next years more bearable.