Adult Education

She's spunky, and youthful, though if she hadn't told me her age I would've placed her in her mid-sixties anyhow merely because of comments she's made this year and because I know she's a widow. She doesn't remember it but I do: when I first got home from Oregon and worked for Mediation she was one of our mediators. She never mentioned it back then but the boss told me that her husband was ill, and falling more ill, while she caregave at home.

It's some years later tho; and according to her New England lilted words Well if you all will have me I plan on staying here as long as I am able. I consider this a calling, it's not teaching to me or even a job. I had just finished telling her about the new mother I assessed and counseled for placement in her GED class. The new student is 31. Mom of 7 kids. Last husband a military man who abused the hell out of her and the kids. Her own mother would leave literally weeks at a time; she was seven when she first remembers being removed by DSS for neglect--she had for several days been caring for a disabled sister because mom was missing. She has the most level head on her shoulders, and an 8th grade education. Her initial assessments with me show that she will likely have her high school diploma by the end of the year.

People are so infinitely able of survival. It is a primal drive, and again and again this year I have been levelled by the young women and men, and the aged out of work or laid-off women and men, by this huuuge un-named population of working poor that have put their lives on the table before me and again and again demonstrated unwavering spirit in the face of life stories that I can not imagine nor comprehend.

In the middle of telling the teacher about her new student, I started to get choked up and had to take a small pause. I stopped what I was doing, put the student file on the desk and just looked at her. We are so lucky, Carolee, we are so blessed to be among these students. To get to do the work we do.

Adult Education, at the risk of reiterating some trite expression, has educated me beyond what I ever expected or knew could happen. It has shaped the adult woman I have both slowly and startlingly learned to become. My first year teaching, the winter of 2002 in to 2003, I lived five doors down from the mentor Instructor I'd been recommended to spend time with. She is a jolly, warm-hearted Catholic with three kids and as many dogs and she used to make me iced coffee and laugh this enormous river of acceptance and forgiveness around me when we would get in the car and I'd have to blow in my hummer-breathalyzer in order to get my damn car to go. She told me Whenever you have more resources then somebody, more money, more wisdom, more education, it is never your job to look down or judge or even sympathize. Look them eye to eye, then remember it is your job to share, and your work is to lift them up. It makes me choke on the heaviness in my chest to say it aloud now...Then she'd say Never forget that all of us, all of us were lifted up. All of us are standing on a long, unseeable chain of the giants that went before us. Whoever they were...

I shared this with Carolee yesterday before I left the Family Center for my thirty minute drive through the rural farm country back to the little Eastern Shore metro of Easton and my office. Accessible education. Meeting people on leveled ground, then giving them tools to be lifted up. I had no idea what it would feel like to get to be someone standing down here, on the shoulders of people like the teacher yesterday, or my mentor back then, and students in a line towering above me.