I think back to my first-year experience at the University of Western Ontario in 1968. A small-town girl on her first big adventure under her own steam, I brought with me my high school track record: good-enough grades that allowed admission; a penchant for playing hooky motivated by a robust quarrel with the norms that defined clever, pretty, popular; and an interest in being the class clown as a further form of protest.
University I thought might provide more amenable terrain. However, the sheer expanse of the manicured campus, the spread of its buildings and tunnels, the volume of baby boomers bursting its seams, and the demands of six full courses overwhelmed. I was a stranger in yet another foreign landscape and could not figure out how I could possibly fit in, let alone flourish.
Of course, I figured everyone else had the tool box and the guide book I could not access, though I understand now, having taught in university systems for 30 years, that many students suffer the same assumptions.
Universities may have become more aware of the needs of their first-year populations, more literate and responsive to the challenges faced, but in 1968 there was very little that acknowledged the fraught nature of this transition, nothing in place to support it, and a crass acceptance of a patriarchal model that prized a stiff upper lip in the face of the obstacle course the academy relied upon to separate chaff from wheat.
My first-year English class was a survey course from Chaucer to… well I don’t quite remember. But I had to write academic papers. I went to the library. It was the biggest library I had ever seen. We could research titles in the card catalogues and bring those titles on little pieces of paper to the circulation desk, and then librarians would run up and down the stacks (I think there were at least six levels) and bring the books back to us if they were available. I cannot imagine how tired staff were by the end of any shift.
I decided that for my essay I would write about the function of what is called the marginal gloss in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The gloss is designed by the poet himself to explain, sometimes summarize (often ironically) the poem he himself has written.
I further decided I would read every book in the library that referenced this technique. I had never written a research paper, but felt sure that reading everything gave me a fighting chance.
And so I read… and the professional, polished, published and seemingly flawless literary essays I read were so captivating in terms of language alone — a foreign language but captivating nonetheless — I felt compelled to rewrite them verbatim as notes for my paper. Miles and miles (before the metric system) of lined, yellow, perforated pads, building blocks I stacked carefully on my desk, as a child might build a tower — I was in the academy, after all.
I approached my interpretation of Coleridge’s gloss with what I felt was research preparedness. I constructed an argument and submitted the paper, particularly proud of my bibliography, for I had never created one before and the very shape of it felt ennobling.
I received a D-. The professor felt that was generous. In his closing written note he wondered what the hell I thought I was doing and asked to see me.
He was very intimidating. He seemed to enjoy being very intimidating. He observed that he did not know why I had come to university, why I thought I had written an English essay, and suggested I think of something else to do with my life.
I was quite numb when I left his office. I don’t think I was able to process the series of insults he casually offered as feedback. I kept the paper. For years.
I continued my undergraduate education, with skin thickening, a more highly developed GPS so I could discover courses that might coincide with my interests, and a growing sense of my own right to interpret material even if it did not confirm established approaches.
Over the course of my teaching career, I grew even more steadfast in my grasp of how students can be marginalized within systems and how important it is to confront the margins assigned to them by higher authorities.
I recall my first foray into Coleridge’s intriguing gloss. I knew it was important but struggled to define why and how. My own emerging glosses reveal the dive into creative art, the deep and delicious struggling for meaning and mattering that my first-year English professor chose not to value.
In recalling that experience, I consider that “essay” means to attempt, to try. Would that this very learned man could have understood the worth inherent within a sincere attempt.
Even then, however, I came to value his evaluation of my gloss experience precisely because it taught me I had the right to dive into the unknown — whether a remarkable poem or a place of “higher” education — and, as importantly, how not to teach.
I used his commentary on my 1968 Coleridge paper 20 years later in university courses I was teaching, inviting students to bring in work they had created at any grade level, accompanied by teacher evaluations that rendered them an outsider through commentary that bewildered, angered, disappointed, humiliated or diminished them.
We shared our “war stories” together as part of our analysis of the merit of assessment processes within competitive, graded and hierarchical systems. We formed alliances, re-envisioning the margins we might have been consigned/reduced to, discovering time and time again that they could be interrogated by a belief in our authenticity and our right to try.
As a 73-year-old woman in my third act, I know this sense of legitimacy is necessary, the dedication to the questioning of norms is transformative, and the challenging of established practices is life-giving.
In pushing against exclusionary boundaries, we actualize authentic selves that deserve expression in every one of the life chapters we enter.
