NYS TESOL Publication: Idiom

Never Fade Away
- An Education Novel How a Wretched Teaching Situation Became a Novel -
by William Hart

While I was completing my doctoral requirements in English, I began teaching as an adjunct for a basic writing program at a public university in central Los Angeles. Most of the students on that campus were recent immigrants from Asia or Latin America, and nearly all the rest were American minorities writing in nonstandard forms of English, at least some of the time.

My graduate training, and common sense as well, assured me that my task was to prepare my students for their writing assignments in college and beyond. I taught the course as I had successfully taught similar courses on two other college campuses. I really liked the students, who brought experiences from all over the world to include in their papers. Many wrote about wars in the lands they’d fled, wars I knew my government had sponsored or was sponsoring, directly or indirectly. My thought was, let me welcome these U.S.-created refugees to America by helping them find out something good about us. I felt the course went quite well, and the students seemed to enjoy it. I’ve never had another class that loved to joke and laugh as much as that irreverent polyglot crew.

At the end of our 10-week quarter, I was stunned when most of my students—even As and Bs—failed the departmental exit exam, which counted 100%. Those failing the course for the second time, I learned, had thereby flunked out of school. At home that night I drank too much as I reflected on this indisputable fact: I worked for a remedial program that remedied the illness by killing the patient. The lethal medicine: a culturally biased final exam graded 95% for conformity to standard grammar and 5% for thought, creativity, voice, and logic all taken together. It was as though the final had been carefully designed to weed out writers of nonstandard English.

College teaching positions at the time were scarce (still are), so I continued with that employer. I began to meet other teachers on the faculty who felt as I did about the program—that it had to go. Although we dissenters were nearly all adjuncts, we took courage from one another and from the certainty our cause was just. We began to protest against the punitive writing program, both inside and outside the department.

When the departmental administration retaliated against us in the predictable ways, we filed grievances with our academic union, a lot of grievances. Eventually, the hullabaloo attracted the attention of the dean of undergraduate studies, himself a second-language speaker of English. He formed an ad hoc committee to investigate, and as a result the comp program’s dirty laundry was hung out for weeks, smelling to high heaven, in the student newspaper. Then came the dismissal of our fieriest adjunct, who filed charges with the U.S. Department of Justice for unfair termination. A federal investigation followed, then a visit from the regional board of accreditation. In the end the writing program was scrapped and a much fairer one designed, mainly by two adjunct ESL teachers.

During the years it took to win our unlikely victory, I saw that the situation merited a novel, and decided to write that book. Creativity became a way for me to deal with the anger and frustration I felt over what was happening so unfairly to my students, and by that time to me. I could have let fiction follow fact, narrating the struggle of adjuncts fighting as a team, but I saw early on that there would be more drama if one teacher fought alone. With the help of my wife, also a writing teacher (whose native language is Bengali), I developed the idea of telling the story through two characters, a teacher and a student, as they write in their daily journals—revealing their thoughts close to the bone. I wanted to show what it’s like for both talented students and caring teachers to be trapped in such a program as I had seen. I wanted to write a book for language teachers, especially teachers of ELLs, to illustrate the many problems unique to our profession, and to suggest solutions for some.

That instructors respond well to the book pleases me greatly, because I worked hard for that; I planned it almost from the first. The surprise has been in the reaction of international students, who find in Tina Li, the Vietnamese coprotagonist, a source of strength in their struggles to understand the United States., our rich, but decadent culture, and the English language. Many ELLs have written to thank me for creating a valued new friend. A few, fully understanding what they are doing, write to Tina directly, pouring out their hearts much as she does in her journal. What a touching bonus for a writer!

Far too many instructors have written to tell me they teach for, or have taught for, programs like the one I depict in the book.

William Hart is a novelist and poet who taught college ESL in Los Angeles for many years. He writes documentary scripts for his wife, PBS producer/director Jayasri Majumdar of Calcutta, India. <hartsarts@earthlink.net>

Editor’s Note:
After reading Bill Hart’s poignant novel I asked him to write an article for Idiom, as our theme is “Writing” and he will be a guest speaker at our upcoming conference. This article provides a brief review of Hart’s remarkable story. It’s a page-turner! Never Fade Away can be ordered through any bookstore and from Amazon.com. Book reviews can be viewed on Amazon.com. Bill Hart will be a speaker at our annual conference in Syracuse.