Half-Read Books: Whole Lessons

Recently I leant the book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, by Paulo Freire, to a friend who either currently or in the past taught elementary school. When I found out she was a teacher, I quickly remembered this book, one that I had been required to read in my senior year of college, for an education class I reluctantly took to fill a credit requirement. I had found it thrilling, heart pounding, and comforting. She returned it to me recently, delicately sealed in a plastic baggie, and commented that she didn't read the whole thing, but found it intellectual, stimulating, and effective in bringing up memories from her past experiences with her students, teaching them poetry, etc.

I smiled with some understanding and sadness that she didn't finish it, and that she found it intellectual. It is true that Freire's work is not easy to understand. There are also cultural differences between his teaching experiences with children and illiterate young adults and adults in South America, and teaching mostly American and Mexican-American children in Southern California. However, Freire always speaks in generalities, using terms and references that indicate his letters are meant for the world, meant for humankind in various states of government and organization. Even still, this book is a work of theory; this work is information meant to challenge and argue, to draw out ideas and examine them, even to mercilessly scrutinize ideas until new perspectives are identified. I realize that I smiled with sadness because I wanted to see a spark in her eyes, a light of new hope, or some intense, childlike energy. I wanted to share my love of this work with someone, especially a teacher.

She did enjoy what she had read. I suppose I was disappointed at the idea that she felt the intellectual nature of the book was too much for her. Yet, I understood. How many times did I read theory in college and feel like crying (fine, maybe I did cry a few times), feeling that I would never understand such concepts. I still feel this way when I read theory. I begin to sense an energy, a rush of anticipation at devouring new information or new ideas, and then it comes, the fear. The fear that I don't understand everything. The fear that I'm outside of the intellectual circle, and that even if I wasn't, what I have to offer the circle isn't good enough.

These fears used to be very real to me, but now, a couple of years after college, I am not so intimidated nor so afraid of ideas. However, I am still afraid of not being good enough for academia. I see how I am saddened by my friend's fear, by the ease with which she explained that she didn't read the whole book, because I see my own fears, the ease with which I say that I'm not planning on going to graduate school, that I haven't written anything on Moby-Dick in over a year, that I haven't read any theory in just as long.

Freire has a chapter in his book entitled "Don't Let the Fear of What is Difficult Paralyze You." Freire states, simply, and reassuringly, that

"[s]tudying is a demanding occupation, in the process of which we will encounter pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt, and happiness. For this reason, studying require the development of rigorous discipline, which we must consciously forge in ourselves. No one can bestow or impose such discipline on someone else; the attempt implies a total lack of knowledge about the educator's role in the development of discipline. In any case, either we are the agents of this discipline, or it becomes a mere appendage to ourselves. Either we adhere to study with delight or accept it as necessity and pleasure, or it becomes a mere burden and, as such, will be abandoned at the first crossroads.

The more we accept this discipline, this more we strengthen our ability to overcome threats to it and thus to our ability to study effectively."

He goes on to exhort his readers to never "stop at the at the level of emotions, of intuitions," when reading a text. I feel my heart blossom in the freedom of his exhortation. Does this mean that I am free? Free to love books, not because they are great, or classics, or literature, or funny, or important, but because I love words and stories? I am consistently afraid that I am not allowed to love literature. I am tired of being paralyzed by fear. I am tired of being panicked that my love of literature makes any of my scientific observations more vulnerable to attack and dismissal. I am tired of thinking that my love of literature could be taken from me as it is inevitably revealed that my ideas are not important, relevant, or high enough for others to enjoy.

All of this insecurity has troubled me since the day I walked into my first English class, in Fullerton, at 23. I carry a terrible shame about going to college with an eighth grade education. I battled this shame with bravado, superior attitudes, insistence that my reading list outranked most college graduates in terms of greatness and literature. I hid this gnawing rat of shame that my intelligence is and always will be linked to those dark years of "teenage wasteland." It loomed constantly over my experiences in college, when every B was a travesty, when I would have miscommunications and struggles with instructors or texts. And even as I was walking in procession during my university commencement, I couldn't be happy with any of the recognition without telling myself, yes, I suppose it's pretty good for the girl who left school at 13.

I have been given the opportunity to see, through the sad and dismissive eyes of my friend, who sealed this book of generous encouragement in sanitary plastic, my own abandonment of education, largely due to the shame I willingly carry about my upbringing and childhood experience. This is what hit home for me. Usually, I would judge her as not courageous enough to finish the work, or lazy, but now, with a clear mind I see myself. I see how I have mostly given up on graduate school.

But maybe all is not lost. Before putting the book away, back with its comrades in theory, in my own personal theory section in my library, I quickly read the introduction, which moved me to tears, and inspired me to write this post. Written by Joe L. Kincheloe, esteemed professor, author, and rigorous critic of pedagogue, the introduction speaks about an experience Kincheloe had as an undergraduate in which a professor claimed that a beloved researched paper Kincheloe has slaved over was not original work, and without any proof stated it must be plagiarized. The professor blasted him with: "I know that someone like you is not capable of such work." Kincheloe explains, "In retrospect I think he was referring to my Appalachian markers: the Tennessee mountain accent, cheap clothes, the nontraditional scholarly persona." And yet, what Kincheloe did next hit me right in the heart. He tells, "I walked over to the library and returned to the works...the ideas soothed my agitated mind like an opiate." Returning to the work has always been a saving grace for me. Even fighting myself, fighting my own voice that would oppress me and have believe the lie that there is no place for a 32 year-old female adult-child with an eighth-grade education in university academia, I have always returned to the work. I return to Melville, to Faulkner, to Jonathan Culler, to Derrida, to Freud, to Kirkengard, to Gilbert and Gubar.

Perhaps it's time to get the thirteen year-old dropout alcoholic off my back, and return to the work.