Category: Academic Life & Labour

Reason Enough

Reading Time: < 1 minute

People asked me sometimes
why I stayed.

Not unkindly.
They were trying to understand
the logic of a person
who keeps returning to work
that does not return the security,
that does not build the pension,
that does not accumulate the seniority
that turns years into rights.

Why do you stay?

I told them the practical things.
The schedule. The work I wanted.
The absence of a better map.

All of that was true.
None of that was the reason.

The reason was you.

The student who sent me the essay
she had written for another class,
subject line: you taught me how to do this.

The student who came back
three years later
to tell me she had gotten the promotion
and in the interview
she had used the framework
from week four
and it had worked.

The student who wrote,
in the comments of the final discussion:
I did not think I was someone who could do this.
I think that now.

You were the reason.

Not the institution.
Not the contract.
Not the annual calculation
of whether my labour
was worth another year of rental.

You.
Specifically and collectively.
Every September cohort.
Every cohort that arrived uncertain
and left knowing something
about themselves and the world
and the relationship between the two
that they did not know before.

I was part of that.

That is not nothing.
That is not a small thing
to dress up as sufficient.

That is a life’s work
that I am not willing to diminish
because the institution
chose not to recognize it properly.

It was reason enough.
It was always reason enough.

Siempre fuiste suficiente razón. Siempre.
You were always reason enough. Always.

Open Learning

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Consider the name.

Open Learning.
As if the learning itself had been freed,
let out of something,
given room to move.

Open.

The door is open.
Come in from wherever you are.
Come in from the night shift.
Come in from the town with no campus.
Come in from the kitchen table, the hospital waiting room,
the car in the parking lot
because it is the only quiet place.

We will meet you there.

I was the one who met them there.
Twenty-five years of meeting people
in the in-between places,
in the cracks of other lives,
in the margins of schedules
that could not afford to be full.

I was the access point.
I was how Open Learning opened.

And I did it from my own margins.

No office. No door with my name on it.
No corridor that said I was expected,
no meeting where my seat was already set.
I opened the door for others
from outside the building.

This is not a complaint.
The work was real.
The students were real.
What happened in those course shells,
in those late-night discussion boards,
in those submissions that arrived at midnight
because midnight was the only hour left,

that was real.

I am only saying:
Open Learning was open for everyone
except the people who taught it.

We were kept at the same careful distance
as the students we were hired to reach.

Aquí estoy. En el margen. Que también es un lugar.
Here I am. In the margin. Which is also a place.

Permanent Within Myself

Reading Time: < 1 minute

There is no review for this.

No renewal date.
No form to fill.
No committee to satisfy
with evidence of continued relevance.

I have been, it turns out,
continuous.

I have been the same person
in every contract,
through every expiry,
past every bar they raised
when I reached the one they set before.

They changed the terms.
I did not change.

That is not stubbornness.
That is a different kind of tenure.

The kind you cannot be denied
because you are the institution granting it.
The kind that does not require
a vote in your absence,
a decision made by people
who have never sat in the room
with you and a student
at the moment something shifts.

I grant it to myself.

Twenty-five years of continuous service
to the work,
to the students,
to the belief that education
belongs to the people who need it most
and not only to the people
who can get to a campus
between nine and four
on the days it is open.

I am permanent in that.

I always was.

They never had the authority to say otherwise.
They had a spreadsheet and a budget line.
That is a different kind of power entirely.

Soy permanente en mí misma. Siempre lo fui.
I am permanent within myself. I always was.

I Was Always Good Enough

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Not almost.
Not nearly.
Not with a few more credentials
or one more publication
or the specialization they mentioned
in the meeting where they shook my hand
and told me what a strong candidate I was.

Good enough.
Already.
On the first day.

I need to say that
not because it feels true today
but because it was true then
and I did not know it
and I want the person reading this
who is in the first years of their own contract
to know it sooner than I did.

You are already good enough.

The bar they are raising
is not a measure of your readiness.
It is a measure of what the system requires
to justify not deciding.
Those are different instruments entirely.

I spent years trying to pass a test
that was not designed to be passed.
I got better at the material
and the test kept changing
and I thought the problem was my preparation
when the problem was the test.

I was always good enough.

I know that now the way you know things
that came at some cost,
held in the body alongside the cost,
inseparable from it.

I am not sorry it took so long.
I am not sorry I kept trying.
I am saying that trying was not the proof.

I was the proof.
I always was.
The trying was just something to do
with the goodness I already had
while I waited for the room to see it.

The room did not always see it.
I see it.
That is enough now.
That is more than enough.

Siempre fui suficiente. Lo sé ahora con todo el cuerpo.
I was always enough. I know it now with my whole body.

My Name on Nothing

Reading Time: < 1 minute

There is no door.

There was never a door.
No nameplate. No placard.
No modest rectangle of plastic or metal
in the corridor that says:
this person is expected here,
this person has a place,
this person belongs to this building
and this building belongs to them.

I brought my things in a bag.
I carried what I needed
and I carried it back out again
and there was no place in the institution
that held the shape of my absence
when I was not in it.

Other people have offices.
A desk that knows them.
A chair adjusted to their body.
A window they have looked out of
long enough to know
what the tree outside it does in every season.

I knew the tree outside my window at home.

I taught from that window for years.
Students in other cities, other provinces,
learned in the light of a tree
they never knew existed,
a tree whose name they do not know,
outside a house that was never on the campus map.

My name is not on any door.

It is on the emails they still have.
It is in the feedback they kept.
It is in the thing they said in the interview
that came from week four of my course.
It is in the company name
one student chose
because of a value she learned
in a room she never entered.

My name is on all of that.

None of that is on a door.
All of that is real.

Mi nombre está en lo que construí, no en lo que me dieron.
My name is on what I built, not on what I was given.

April

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Other people have a season for flowers.

I had a season for waiting.

April meant: the email is coming.
Or it is not coming yet,
which is a different kind of coming,
the kind where the silence is its own sentence
and you read it every morning
alongside the other emails
pretending you are not reading it.

I got good at April.

I got good at the specific productivity of dread,
the way you clean things
when you are waiting for news,
the way work fills itself with more work
so the part of the mind that is waiting
has somewhere else to be.

The tulips came up anyway.
They always came up.
They did not wait for anyone’s decision
about whether they were qualified
to be tulips in this particular garden.

I noticed that.
Some Aprils that was the only thing I could learn
that felt like instruction.

The tulips. Their absolute commitment
to coming back
regardless.

Regardless.

I came back too.
Twenty-five Aprils.
Not regardless.
I knew what I was returning to.
I returned anyway
because the work was the work
and the students were already there
and the door was still open enough
to walk through.

But I noticed the tulips.
I want you to know I noticed them.

Abril tras abril. De todas formas, volví.
April after April. I came back anyway.

I Never Met You in a Room

Reading Time: 2 minutes

But I knew you.

I knew the way you wrote in the first week,
careful and a little formal,
the voice of someone not yet sure
they are allowed to take up space here.

I knew when that changed.
I always knew when that changed.

You started to trust the sentence.
You stopped apologizing for the question.
You wrote something in week six
that made me sit with it before I answered,
because it deserved sitting with,
because you had found something true
in the material and also in yourself
and the two had met on the page
and made something I had not seen before.

I marked it the way it deserved to be marked.
I wrote more than I was required to write.

That is not unusual.
I always wrote more than I was required.

The institution did not ask me to see you.
The institution asked me to assess you,
to place you in a category,
to move you through.

I did the other thing anyway.

I saw you.

The one who disappeared in week nine
and came back in week eleven
with no explanation,
and I did not ask for one,
I just held the door open
and said: you are still here,
that is what matters,
let us keep going.

The one who wrote at the bottom of the final submission:
I almost quit in October.
I don’t know if you noticed
but the way you responded to my post that week
was the reason I didn’t.

I noticed.
I always noticed.
I just did not know you were on the edge.
That is the thing about teaching through a screen,
you learn to read the small signals,
the slight change in tone,
the post that is shorter than usual,
the question that is not really about the assignment.

You were always more than the assignment.

I knew that from week one.
I built the course so you would know it too.

You wrote to me years later,
some of you.
Subject lines I still have.

I wanted you to know.
I think about that class.
I got the job.

I am keeping those.
Whatever else they take,
they will not take those.

You were the reason I came back every year.
Not the contract.
Not the renewal.

You.
Specifically.
The particular you
that showed up in September
not knowing yet
what you were capable of.

I knew.
I always knew before you did.
That was the job.
That was the whole job.

Para los que llegaron desde lejos y de todas formas llegaron.
For the ones who came from far away and arrived anyway.