The very first college class I taught was run by a community college but held in a building owned by a  communications company in Livermore.  This was 1988, and the company was growing or sputtering or both simultaneously, and they'd laid off and/or wanted their work force retrained for the coming boom or bust (the company was swallowed up some years ago PacMan style by another communications firm).  The class I taught was part of the PACE program, which colleges developed especially for re-entry students, holding classes at night and on the weekends, making sure all general education requirements were offered in a timely fashion so that the working person could obtain his or her A.A. degree in 18 months.

I'd never taught a class before, impressing the interview committee not with my experience but with my small list of publications.  I'd only tutored international students while getting my B.A., the most memorable experience hearing my student from Hong Kong read these words aloud:  "Like a balloon explode suddenly, my heart was something empty."

I knew nothing except what I'd learned as a student.  This knowledge could be boiled down to the following:  Make it interesting, be clear and fair, provide good examples, don't use red pen.

Looking back, I knew nothing about just about everything, and I'm glad I didn't know that then.

So there I was, aged 26, wearing the new jacket and skirt my mother bought me, walking into the large boardroom on the 4th floor of the building that then stood alone at the edge of what looked liked former farmland.  Sitting at the large table were a group of adult people who could have taught me a thing or two about life, had they had the patience or the curriculum.  If I'd passed out the weeks as homework, I'm sure we would have learned about struggle and loss and achievement and children and marriage and faith.  But this was an English class, and I was supposedly the expert.

But how could that be?  I wasn't expert in anything, having done nothing really that well.  I'd gotten my degrees, had my babies, but I lived in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Oakland, barely scraping by on my husband's teaching salary.  He was trying to pull his small business together he did on the side and was often gone from home, leaving me with two small children, not a lot of cash, and more anxiety.  How could I teach these people anything that would help them save their jobs?

I tried to keep them from asking that question themselves, walking into the room every Wednesday evening and Saturday morning smiling, passing out readings, talking brightly.  I focused on them, hearing about their lives, their dreams.  I read their essays, correcting them in blue ink.

This wasn't freshman comp, but the class below that, a very basic essay writing class, the type where one learns how to write a thesis statement, organize an argument, and conclude it.  We were going to compare and contrast, show cause and effect, work deductive and inductive reasoning.  The hope was that we were going to do this is relatively correct English.

On we went, the weeks passing, the last of summer turning into fall and then the first inkling of winter.  I read their essays, I passed them back.  I bought another suit.  I spent a lot of time at Kinko's because driving out to the college campus to make copies was another 10 miles of gasoline, and I was already driving in from Oakland.  My husband and I liked the extra money, and the college offered me another class, this time over at the Hayward campus, teaching in the PACE program, but no longer in the business park.

During the last week of class, I gave them back their essays.  All of them had passed the course, ready to move on to freshman composition and the courses that would push them toward their A.A.  I said goodbye, wished them luck, and we all went home to our lives and to our futures.

Now I wish I could go back to them all and thank them for staying in the class, for holding me up as much as I might have held them.  I want to thank them for not laughing when I came in, so young and untried and in such an ugly suit, and attempted to show them something about life.  I gave them sentences and ideas.  They gave me the encouragement to keep trying, to go at it all again the next semester, to take this path, the one I am still on.

Jessica