Angus JohnstonKonto zweryfikowane

Trump’s reflexive contempt for working people is so central to his character and his rhetoric.

One thing I’ve learned in nine years of community college teaching is that students will surprise you if you let them. But if Trump could pull a B in one of my classes? Well, I’d be surprised.

Quick story about the kind of students I teach. Don't think I've told this one before.

This was while I was still in grad school. I was teaching at a four-year college then, but it was CUNY, and it was a night class, so very similar to community college student demographics.

This one student wasn't doing too well. Not much class participation, low-ish grades on quizzes. I'd pegged him as a slacker.

Midway through the semester he comes to office hours for the first time. Asks if I can tell him which parts of the readings are most important.

To my shame, I assumed he was looking to cut corners. Gave him a spiel about how everything I assign is important, that's why I assign it. (Blah blah blah. I'm cringing, typing this.)

He nods, but doesn't quite give up. He's being respectful but insistent. Eventually I ask him what's going on. I have to ask a couple of times before I get it out of him.

Turns out he has cancer, and he's in a lot of pain. He's got meds, but the meds interfere with his reading comprehension and retention.

He's taking my course while he's fighting cancer, and he's skipping his pain meds to do the readings for my stupid little intro class.

And he's been doing this for more than a month, and he didn't tell me, even when I asked the first time. And all he's asking for is a bit of guidance so he can do the work he needs to do more efficiently.

This guy was working harder at his CUNY degree than Trump works at being president of the United States, and he wasn't the hardest-working student I've had. Not by a mile.

And I've been at this long enough to know that for every story like that I have, there's at least dozen more students who decided their struggles were none of my goddamn business.

(I structure my classes and syllabi now so that there's flexibility built in—if you tank a quiz, you don't need to pour your heart out to me to get it excused. Your life is your business.)

(And I've learned to second-guess myself when I find myself forming negative conclusions about students, too.)

Even with all his resources, Trump would struggle under the weight of a community college courseload. If he tried to do it under the conditions my students do it? He'd flame out in the first semester.

One more thing to add to this thread. Lots of academics and scholars have been responding talking about their CC experience, and that's great, but it's not the whole story.

Because it's not just Trump's understanding of the role of the community college in higher ed that's screwed up, it's his understanding of vocational and technical education.

If my students are studying to be dental hygienists or lab technicians or accountants, they're no less students for that. My college is no less a college for that.

I'm a historian, first of all. I teach history. A history student is a history student, whether they're going to go on to be an attorney or a professor or a bookkeeper or an auto mechanic.

And beyond that, the idea that there's this bright line between "real" academic disciplines and whatever else you study in college is garbage as well.

The best math teacher I ever had was a moonlighting engineer who was teaching trig in summer school to kids who had flunked it in the NYC public schools during the previous year.

My high school diploma is from a smartypants school. The math teachers there were very very good. But they couldn't make me see math, couldn't make me love math. This guy could.

If i could go back and take three classes again, of all the classes I've taken in my life—including those I took from some of the best historians in the world—that summer school trig class would be one of them.

And there are thousands of professors just like that guy teaching in community colleges around this country. Real professors teaching real students. Changing their lives.