Salon Books | Last exit for education


Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon Advanced Search \| Help - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Books Reviews "Who Killed Kirov?" Since it isn't hard to guess, this investigation works better as a biography than as a whodunit. By Katharine Whittemore [06/11/99] Every book is a lesbian book The author of "Bastard out of Carolina" recalls how her youthful imagination found Sapphists under the most unlikely covers. By Dorothy Allison [06/10/99] Reviews "The Holocaust in American Life" and "The Americanization of the Holocaust" Two books ask how -- and why -- a European catastrophe became central to American culture. By Jesse Berrett [06/10/99] Reviews "Layover" A woman on the verge of a breakdown finds herself sneaking into hotel rooms. By Maria Russo [06/09/99] Ivory Tower Turko-Armenian war brews in the Ivory Tower After a century of debate about the Armenian massacres, can the Turkish government endow chairs at American universities without branding Turkish studies as wholly corrupt? By Christopher Shea [06/09/99] Complete archives for Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		A prodigal son of the community college returns to teach in the classrooms that once gave him his only chance to escape. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Peter Bebergal June 11, 1999 \| Sitting before me were three single mothers, all under 25; an African soccer player; a French-Haitian woman who spoke four languages; five guys named Mark, 18 to 20, none of whom had ever left the city they grew up in; a straight-edge skate punk who looked like a Marine; a white middle-class real-estate agent; and a female ex-con who stared at me like a gopher looking down the barrel of a hunter's rifle. It was my first day of teaching composition at a community college, the same one where I had been a student, almost 10 years before. As I got up to write my name on the board, a young woman snapped her gum and asked snickeringly if I was the real teacher or just another temp. I assured her I was there to stay, although a month later, with only five people showing up regularly, I find myself wondering about this vow. But when I look out across the fields of desks and Coke cans, I remember: This is where I came from and this is where I belonged. One afternoon when I was 18 and attending 12th grade for the second time, the principal asked me to visit him in his office. He told me my attitude was not "conducive to learning" in the public high school. From his vaguely impatient bureaucratic air, I'm certain that if he could have, he would have expelled me on the spot. As an easily unimpressed smartass, I was just the sort of student who gives school administrators headaches. On that day, however, the principal simply set down a piece of paper that needed only my signature. I would be allowed to leave the school and finish my high school credits at the local community college. How could I say no? I imagined hot older women, who -- having escaped the clutches of their illiterate, impotent husbands -- enrolled in classes with no other intention than to drag some young high school dropout into their floral-sheeted beds. I imagined a life where the freedom was as intoxicating as vodka and abundant as air. I soon found out that this attitude was not conducive to community college learning either. In fact, everyone expected more from me because everyone assumed that I had made a choice to be there. Instead of hot older women preying shamelessly on my 18-year-old body, I discovered serious people with serious lives trying to turn hopeless situations into fertile opportunities. I soon flunked out. Next page \| Begging for mercy from the disciplinary committee


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