BY JOELLEN COLLINS
Last weekend I had the pleasure of being with my grandchildren in a very relaxed situation, and somehow we talked about their assigned compositions. My granddaughter was planning a late-night session working on a topic I found appealing.
As an English teacher, I often struggled with thinking of interesting topics and then, after the students had grappled with the ideas, grading many dozens of their efforts. The other day someone asked me how I could stand grading all of those papers. I paused a minute and answered, that was my job, but the treat was that often in the pile of, say, 35 papers from a tenth-grade class, I would find a gem, or learn something about my students or see a sign of wisdom that was new to me. So even wading through the process of noting errors, suggesting possibilities of different word choice or sentence structure, my job was to write a comment in which I always tried to have a positive note about something, even if I realized it wasn’t the student’s best effort. I could feel a sense of pleasure and delight with my job, always an adventure, even correcting all those papers.
When my house burned down many years ago, I remember I had a set of compositions from 50 students I had at Santa Monica College where I was teaching part-time at that moment of my life. I had left the stack of papers in my car and, of course, they didn’t burn when my house did, so I jokingly went back to class the following Monday and said, “Guess what, guys, I might be a little late correcting these papers but darn it—they survived the fire!” We all had a good laugh.
But when I realized the composition that my granddaughter was writing I was very impressed and moved by the prompt, as the topic reached into the souls and the aspirations of the students who tackled it. Students were to discuss the question of how “coming of age” involves defining and asserting your true face, shaped by or in rejection of the expectation of others, parents’ ethnic backgrounds, school traditions, and the mores of their time. Books assigned for the topic were, for example, The Joy Luck Club. What a wonderful way to stimulate the minds of students and the hours of the teacher reading the papers!
I have been reflecting on how much one’s life is dealing with finding one’s true self and living it with honor. Of course, we must also reach out to others who don’t have the same attitudes or philosophies while being comfortable with one’s own choices.
The other day someone asked me why I chose to be a teacher, even though I really wanted to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in England to become a great actress. I laugh about that now. I chose Occidental College and then UCLA and finally, teaching. I now know my true face and personality of talkativeness and storytelling did fit there!
