Tomorrow, I begin my 21st year teaching at UC Riverside. For once, I have no idea what exactly will happen when I face my new students.
I carefully prepared a syllabus for the course -- upper-division fiction -- which is filled with anxious seniors who've been e-mailing me that they need this class to graduate. I'm excited to talk about a former student whose published book we will use. But before we get to all of that, we will have a decision to make.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, September 26, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 31 Editorial pages Desk 1 inches; 65 words Type of Material: Correction
UC strike: An Op-Ed article on Wednesday said the University of California budget has been cut by 3% and that student fees would increase 50% by the end of the academic year. UC's state general revenue fund budget has been cut by 20% compared with two years ago. The regents are considering fee increases that, combined with one already instituted, would raise fees nearly 40%
On all nine UC campuses Thursday, a massive one-day walkout has been organized. The strike has been called by the university workers union and the faculty to protest the way the administration has handled the 3% budget cut facing the UC system. The goal is to protect UC workers making less than $40,000 a year, to force UC President Mark Yudof to make the university's budget public and to reassert the faculty's role in UC governance.
I will leave the decision up to my students: Do we walk out or stay in class? We could end up marching around the bell tower; we could start the work they'll have to master this quarter; or maybe we could do both. It's for them to decide, because after all these years, I value my students -- for the way they cheerfully teach me new words, for the stories they learn to tell, for the new worlds they show me -- above all else.
I am an accidental professor. Without a doubt I am the only UC Riverside prof who once climbed halfway up the venerable bell tower from the outside (I was 10 and grew up nearby). I never thought I would go to college. But I did, becoming a writer and a teacher. Students often write about how teachers change their lives, but this fall I think about all the ways my students have affected me.
Often, I tell my three daughters to put lunch "in the dashboard microwave." That's because John Olivares Espinoza, a UC Riverside student who grew up in Indio, wrote great poems about working for hours in intense heat as the son of a landscaper while his home-packed lunch was warmed by that makeshift oven. When I see an old truck, I remember Darren DeLeon, who wrote a poem about his grandfather's Chevrolet Apache, with the gearshift as his abuelo's scepter and the dashboard his altar.
This summer, I watched the wedding of one of my students (who also became a writer and teacher), which was officiated by his best friend (who also became a writer and teacher). They met 15 years ago in my class. Michael Jaime-Becerra and Patrick Michael Finn published books and made me so proud (the ceremony was funny -- and well written).
