They Don’t Always Come, But When They Do It’s Wow

By Esther Cohen (from Jewish Currents Magazine)

I wish I weren’t, but I am in the you-should-do-this category. While I am not a know-it-all (most things I do not know), I do have the unfortunate You Should Do This Because It’s Good For You quality. As a parent, I tried to sit on it, but often didn’t. Reading, for instance, was the most important thing my son could do. And he didn’t. Some part of me felt that he was therefore doomed. Not the biggest part, but still.

One of the biggest fights we ever had was one day when I came home from work and he was, as always, playing a game on the computer. His playing computer games drove me crazy, and I would picture in my head all these activities he could be doing instead (cooking dinner, creating science experiments, inventing magic tricks, drawing a graphic novel). One day in one of those unfortunate parental What Are You Doing discussions, he who was in seventh grade said, “You’ll never be happy until you come home and find me reading James Joyce. And that will never happen.” I was so pleased that he knew about James Joyce (!) that I dropped the discussion.

I’ve been teaching writing all my life and it’s hard not to have parental expectations of students. They should read what I give them. I’ve taught traditional college classes (I teach Good Stories at Manhattanville College, a former Catholic college with serious good students in Purchase, New York), but most of my classes have been with workers: dishwashers, migrants, nannies. I’m teaching Fast Food Workers now, as part of their national campaign to organize and to change the minimum wage. The class is on Tuesdays. They are usually very late. They don’t read what I give them very often, and they are not particularly good at letting me know when they’ll be at class. They text in class. They even talk on the phone. Continue reading →