Education does not come easily
Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund
Last week, I wrapped up a semester of instructing high school seniors in academic research. The program reaches students, eighth through 12th grade, from underserved areas of New York. Many of them enter with an array of challenges. Language barriers, no family members holding higher education degrees, and low income are only a few of their obstacles, yet all of these students who devote several extra hours with this supplemental curriculum graduate high school in four years, and 99.4 percent have enrolled in four-year colleges.
During the year-end award ceremony, the senior who won best overall essay received a scholarship gifted by a 1995 alumnus. The young woman stood in front of her classmates next to the founder, who read her a message about the life-changing power of spending time with and building confidence in students who need it. She cried the whole time, and while she wasn’t one of my students, the emotion got to me, too.
Since college, I’ve worked in one or a combination of three capacities as a writer, editor, or teacher. Whenever I’ve taught, I remember my mother. In many of the students I’ve invested the most of my time, I’ve seen her.
My mother went to college in the mid-1990s, when I was in grade school. I watched her go through college, knowing few parents like her. It took her nearly 10 years attending part-time to earn her degree. She graduated with honors and three majors, but it took an incredible effort and sacrifice.
Long before I entered college, I watched my mother struggle with writing essays. My mother and father would stay up late together, working out how to structure her arguments. The most notable of my memories of her academic frustration came from a professor who told her that her ideas were “pregnant.” Although she enjoyed the professor as a family friend, she hated that paper. I don’t know if she ever finished it or if she dropped the class, but I know that I had to take an incomplete with the same professor to buy myself time to figure out what he meant when he told me my paper was also “pregnant.”
Growing up with a mother in school taught me that learning was not only good, but a challenging and valuable privilege. As I learn more about my family history, I get a clearer picture of how hard it was for my mom to attempt a college degree at all.
She had a GED, but from what she’s told me, it was anxiety-inducing for her to put more than a few sentences together on paper when she was in her early 20s. She attended school, but there was a lot more going on at home distracting her from taking advantage of an education.
Her whole life, she’d been told she was stupid, that her IQ was too low, and that she better go find someone to take care of her. It’s painful and also shocking for me to hear that. She taught me more about history than I learned from any of my coursework through high school, and I had pretty good conversations with her about Kant when I was in graduate school.
A few years ago, in a thick blue hardback literature anthology, I found her marginalia in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” I remembered that big book sitting on our kitchen and dining room tables when I was a child. It was from one of her first college classes. She had taken notes about the tone of the language and the bizarre nature of a text about a man slowly turning into an enormous insect. Her observations were apt, deep, and her own.
I’ll never need that volume of collected stories, but I keep it on my shelf because it reminds me of how important it is to let students know you believe in their potential. That doesn’t mean grade inflation or pampering. It’s so much harder than that to foster confidence in broken and aimless spirits. Any teacher knows you can’t be the one to win them all, but the good ones will agree it’s worth a try every time they remember getting through to that one person whose spark was waiting to catch fire.
Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund is a former news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum, now living and writing in New York City.
