Video of Harvard conference celebrating 45th anniversary of POTO. Captions needed for Noam Chomsky though because it's barely audible.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
A Narrative Response to Lives on the Boundary
Part two: Learning from the butcher.
The price of becoming older was losing the innocence that mythologized my parents. I was quick to judge them and I was unfair in my assessment of them. But it was necessary to destroy and re-create the images I had of them. My mother became the overbearing parent who focused on the aspects of my education and life that was controllable because she couldn’t control me otherwise. My father, who played a limited role in my educational upbringing was nevertheless a big impact on my life. Driven by an inordinate desire to orient me towards sports and physical abilities, he became a bully. His passion for soccer and the way he identified with the sport never connected with me. His behavior was inconsiderate about how I felt, or whether or not I really enjoyed sports. The interest in basketball I showed was smothered by his excessive coaching and hectoring. I would leave the basketball court feeling helpless and small unable to look at a basketball without some nascent fear of being watched by my father. When I told him I wasn’t cut out for basketball, there was a pained and confused look on his face. Instead of seeing my response as a way to give myself autonomy and control in my life, he saw it as me being a flip-flopper and not serious about sports. In other words, I wasn’t a good son because I wasn’t serious about him.
In college, I was free to choose what I wanted to study. I settled on English as a major and developed a strong inclination to reading. This decision tensed the atmosphere around me because I always got the feeling that my consistent reading habits was somehow viewed as abnormal to him. It didn’t help that he made no effort to ask what I was reading or what my interests were. Once, he told me jokingly that I would get sick from reading too much. I knew that his hyperbole was meant as a critique of my reluctance to go out and interact with people—I was always an introvert and shy around people. The comment, however, proved to me how indifferent he was to me. Indifferent to my college life, my inner life. Through writing and learning about the power of different types of literacy I learned to accept my father for who he is. Learning and literacy is now a paradigm on how I view adult development and such ways of viewing literacy, such as horizontal literacy that takes into account certain cultures and practices that do not use written texts as the primary means of communication, made me understand the richness of my father’s work-life. My father wasn’t interested in the kinds of work that I was doing but this did not diminish him. Ephemeral as his interests in coaching were, there was a mind that inquired and made meaning out of life. This was something I had not seen before. I remember him taking me to the Associated supermarket on Ozone Park where he worked. I was young and bony, the white butcher’s smock big on me. It contrasted with the red streaks on my father’s smock. He showed me the basic setup of packaging and wrapping up cuts of meat all very much pre-packaged. Drawn into that cold frigid environment, I was introduced to the terminology of his workplace—placing cuts of meat on boats, or the Styrofoam trays, making sure a diaper, was used to absorb the excess blood acting as a buffer between the boat and the meat. Getting a crash course into the varieties of meat cuts that were used, some were more tender than other parts, others were tougher. Reflecting on this made me realize that my father used his workplace as an environment to acquire literacy. He had to remember all sorts of terminology, had to interact with customers and had to have the physical dexterity with his hands to make accurate cuts. The cognitive richness of my father’s life remains a deep reserve that I draw inspiration from still. I learned more from him than he will ever know.
The price of becoming older was losing the innocence that mythologized my parents. I was quick to judge them and I was unfair in my assessment of them. But it was necessary to destroy and re-create the images I had of them. My mother became the overbearing parent who focused on the aspects of my education and life that was controllable because she couldn’t control me otherwise. My father, who played a limited role in my educational upbringing was nevertheless a big impact on my life. Driven by an inordinate desire to orient me towards sports and physical abilities, he became a bully. His passion for soccer and the way he identified with the sport never connected with me. His behavior was inconsiderate about how I felt, or whether or not I really enjoyed sports. The interest in basketball I showed was smothered by his excessive coaching and hectoring. I would leave the basketball court feeling helpless and small unable to look at a basketball without some nascent fear of being watched by my father. When I told him I wasn’t cut out for basketball, there was a pained and confused look on his face. Instead of seeing my response as a way to give myself autonomy and control in my life, he saw it as me being a flip-flopper and not serious about sports. In other words, I wasn’t a good son because I wasn’t serious about him.
In college, I was free to choose what I wanted to study. I settled on English as a major and developed a strong inclination to reading. This decision tensed the atmosphere around me because I always got the feeling that my consistent reading habits was somehow viewed as abnormal to him. It didn’t help that he made no effort to ask what I was reading or what my interests were. Once, he told me jokingly that I would get sick from reading too much. I knew that his hyperbole was meant as a critique of my reluctance to go out and interact with people—I was always an introvert and shy around people. The comment, however, proved to me how indifferent he was to me. Indifferent to my college life, my inner life. Through writing and learning about the power of different types of literacy I learned to accept my father for who he is. Learning and literacy is now a paradigm on how I view adult development and such ways of viewing literacy, such as horizontal literacy that takes into account certain cultures and practices that do not use written texts as the primary means of communication, made me understand the richness of my father’s work-life. My father wasn’t interested in the kinds of work that I was doing but this did not diminish him. Ephemeral as his interests in coaching were, there was a mind that inquired and made meaning out of life. This was something I had not seen before. I remember him taking me to the Associated supermarket on Ozone Park where he worked. I was young and bony, the white butcher’s smock big on me. It contrasted with the red streaks on my father’s smock. He showed me the basic setup of packaging and wrapping up cuts of meat all very much pre-packaged. Drawn into that cold frigid environment, I was introduced to the terminology of his workplace—placing cuts of meat on boats, or the Styrofoam trays, making sure a diaper, was used to absorb the excess blood acting as a buffer between the boat and the meat. Getting a crash course into the varieties of meat cuts that were used, some were more tender than other parts, others were tougher. Reflecting on this made me realize that my father used his workplace as an environment to acquire literacy. He had to remember all sorts of terminology, had to interact with customers and had to have the physical dexterity with his hands to make accurate cuts. The cognitive richness of my father’s life remains a deep reserve that I draw inspiration from still. I learned more from him than he will ever know.
Friday, April 11, 2014
A narrative response to Lives on the Boundary
Part one: A great debt
I was the first college graduate in my family. This achievement came with a lot of pressure that was thrust on me from an early age, repeated until it became a mantra: study, do good in school, get a job with good money. My parents had the utmost best intentions in drilling this on me; it was understandable, borne from a narrative of hardship that they both shared. My mother and father both came from poverty, both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were miners who lived hard lives barely scraping by, so the economic realities of schooling resonated more to them becoming the impetus for a college degree. It was a narrative that sometimes haunted me like a specter, looming, always watching me, berating me if I didn’t succeed in school. My mother was a constant disciplinary force, a presence that made me wary of straying from the path, whether it would be a bad test grade, an unsatisfactory comment on a report card, or missing homework. Every time I failed to meet a school standard, she would remind me of how easy I had it, how everything was at my disposal, at my feet. All the resources that I had made it inexcusable that I should be so careless with my studies. This culminated into an episode in third grade where I forgot to do a project of some kind. At my desk, I tried desperately to start the assignment but my mother was furious, yelling and physically overpowering me until something snapped inside me. I beat on the desk with my fists in response to her and broke down bawling. Realizing how far she had gone, she cradled me in her arms and apologized, telling me that she only wanted the best for me and hated to see me squandering. But what exactly was I squandering? To her it was my insufferable disregard for responsibilities; I disrespected the teacher and my parents by not completing the project in time. I had also lied to them and wasted their time. From that day on, I began to see the resources that I had as constant reminders. Symbols of something far deeper, a struggle. For all of the things I had, all of the Encarta encyclopedias, dictionaries, marble composition notebooks, and colorful folders, my mother made no secret of the painful truth that she had to struggle with growing up in poverty. For everything that I had, my mother had nothing. And now whenever I looked at the things I had, I was reminded that my mother had nothing and the room became bare.
I was the first college graduate in my family. This achievement came with a lot of pressure that was thrust on me from an early age, repeated until it became a mantra: study, do good in school, get a job with good money. My parents had the utmost best intentions in drilling this on me; it was understandable, borne from a narrative of hardship that they both shared. My mother and father both came from poverty, both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were miners who lived hard lives barely scraping by, so the economic realities of schooling resonated more to them becoming the impetus for a college degree. It was a narrative that sometimes haunted me like a specter, looming, always watching me, berating me if I didn’t succeed in school. My mother was a constant disciplinary force, a presence that made me wary of straying from the path, whether it would be a bad test grade, an unsatisfactory comment on a report card, or missing homework. Every time I failed to meet a school standard, she would remind me of how easy I had it, how everything was at my disposal, at my feet. All the resources that I had made it inexcusable that I should be so careless with my studies. This culminated into an episode in third grade where I forgot to do a project of some kind. At my desk, I tried desperately to start the assignment but my mother was furious, yelling and physically overpowering me until something snapped inside me. I beat on the desk with my fists in response to her and broke down bawling. Realizing how far she had gone, she cradled me in her arms and apologized, telling me that she only wanted the best for me and hated to see me squandering. But what exactly was I squandering? To her it was my insufferable disregard for responsibilities; I disrespected the teacher and my parents by not completing the project in time. I had also lied to them and wasted their time. From that day on, I began to see the resources that I had as constant reminders. Symbols of something far deeper, a struggle. For all of the things I had, all of the Encarta encyclopedias, dictionaries, marble composition notebooks, and colorful folders, my mother made no secret of the painful truth that she had to struggle with growing up in poverty. For everything that I had, my mother had nothing. And now whenever I looked at the things I had, I was reminded that my mother had nothing and the room became bare.
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