Introduction

My favourite line from a student paper is "Not only was Frederick Douglass a slave, but he had to work for long hours for low pay and frequent beatings." I have written elsewhere about the hilarious and more problematic implications of that line, but I return to it here in reference to my title. Although the "slave in the paper mines" quote comes from one of Margaret Atwood's early novels, the notion of slavery when applied to the low paying positions offered graduate students and sessional instructors is certainly an exaggeration.

This is not meant to make light of the horrific circumstances of actual slaves, but rather to compare how the boundaries between the classes are nearly as firm now as they were before the reconstruction period. Like the slave, the contract labourer working at a college or university is treated as excess labour, is paid poorly if at all for some of their work, is economically and intellectually tied to the profession, and has very few legal protections.

The attempt to trace the circuitous path which led me to become a contract professor must necessarily skirt the edge of my background, my schooling, and my first degree. The graduate schools and various jobs I held before I lodged in my most stable position owe their experiences to my earlier academic life, but only in the final incarnation of my so-called career, have I begun to get a better sense of how little I have in common with my peers.

The lack of fit which has accompanied my working life certainly began when I was a foster child. I was taken away from my parents at eight months old, and although I met them later in life, I was in care for the remainder of my childhood. In those early days, I learned that the secure home that society generally afforded others was not meant for me. My peers helped me with that assessment by their commentary about my clothing, haircuts, and uncouth behaviour. Likewise, my elementary school principal--who declared that I would end up in reform school like my brother--also played a role in making sure that I understood that no one would protect me and I had to look after myself.

As a child, I remember being puzzled when I needed to define my lack of parents. Although I was likely mistaken, I thought I was surrounded by happy families in Tolstoyn terms; if any shared my inheritance, they were silent about the matter. At least fifty percent of what my fellow students described didn't fit my experience. I found many of their responses alienating, as well as their assumption of confidence around authority; paradoxically, the more I learned, the more their lives became cryptic and confusing.

Some might claim that I belonged to the lower or working classes, but even those airy heights were unapproachable from where I started. I came from real poverty. My parents were on welfare when they weren't hospitalized, and my mother's mental illness and my father's chronic alcoholism meant I was removed from their home early. I was a foster child most of my early life, and even the meagre opportunities of the working classes, a labour job, seemed impossible to achieve.

Only slowly did I discover that I had the intellectual curiosity to succeed as well as my peers, and although I never learned to pass as one of them, I was able to carve out a niche where I could make a living. Amongst the people from the upper middle classes who have become my colleagues, I am eccentric, or strange, but they don't have the background to understand that my idiosyncrasies are merely a product of my rural New Brunswick upbringing, of mundane, albeit it extreme poverty, and my own difficulty with the unfounded assumption of authority and privilege.

People like me weren't meant to attend university, both financially and socially, but in that historical moment of the middle 1980s, student loan programs had cracked open a door which had previously been locked against students from an impoverished background. I shouldn't have been able to receive a PhD, or even go to university, but I'd learned to compensate by working harder than my peers when it became apparent that I would never pass as one who belonged in my new milieu.

The Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry claims to have "forgotten my childhood, not just because of my father, but because it was a bleak and unnecessary time." That line has always resonated with me. My sister remembers much more about her childhood than I do, and concerns herself with what happened and what people thought, but I rarely think about the now-distant past.

I was told I was stupid by people easily dumber than me, and even if those messages didn't stick, I'm sure they left a mark. I once told my friend's mother that I was lazy--repeating my foster parents' constant refrain--and she was stunned. She knew about the many cabins I'd built, about the tools I'd made, the many thousands of books I'd read, and my constant activity. I would bicycle thirty kilometres to see my friend, and then bicycle back at the end of the day. She pointed out the error in my thinking, and for the first time I thought to compare myself to my peers.

Bruce merely listened to the radio in the evenings, and her son did little besides read and walk around town. That was when I realized that I had internalized messaging which was not only false but also potentially damaging. It was a watershed moment. I found out that I was wrong about my impression of the world because I'd been lied to by those who were not in a position to predict my future or judge my abilities. That first step on the road to my intellectual life caused me to think about other ways in which I'd absorbed negative sentiments when I should have shucked them off like a snake peeling away dead skin.

Those early years of insecurity and despair left their mark on the dreams which followed me through life--as I continually returned to junior high school especially and dreamt I was late or missing something crucial--but a few bright moments were instrumental in terms of where I am now. Wishing for a kind of escape from my youth, and attempting to satiate a voracious curiosity, I read constantly, and that provided a systematic foundation that I would later call upon when studying.

When I was close to getting thrown out of junior high school for my disruptive behaviour and answering back to teachers, I was helped by the librarian, Karen Whitney, a sweet woman with children of her own, and Marvin Goodine, a shop teacher who claimed to see my potential and tried to shelter me from the worst implications of my clashes with authority. Marvin took me out of other classes and tried to inspire me to share his interest in projects having to do with rural life. He once told me that I'd scored very high on the standardized IQ tests; rather than revel in an attention I didn't deserve, I laughed as I revealed the truth. I would complete part of the test--to let enough time elapse so that I wouldn't be suspected of fudging my answers--and then I would merely tick the remaining boxes. Then I would take out my book--for I was much more interested in reading than writing standardized tests. Marvin was disappointed, but he shook the notion from his head and agreed, "Those tests are nonsense anyway."

His sympathy for my circumstance--for all my teachers had access to the file about my home life--worked much better than the gym teacher, who reacted violently when I said that I thought sports were disgusting (odd word choice, I know, but I was young). There was also the vice principal who strapped my hands when I was sent to the office. Unfortunately, in terms of his efforts to straighten me out by strapping me at least twice a week, my hands were calloused from physical labour; and even if he hurt me I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing that I was in pain. Once I was expelled from middle school, I had to wait until Jane Asher, my social worker--a terrific woman who went out of her way to ensure my success--got me enrolled in high school. I missed certain building blocks, but they were easy to make up for in the higher grades.

Although there were those who did their best to assist me on my journey, there were others who--likely as a result of their own insecurities--tried to make the crowning achievement of their lives seem impossible to their impressionable charges. They had spent their university years swamped by an insurmountable workload that, according to them, only they could have accomplished.

Daniel Merriweather prowled around the classroom with a long stick used for opening the window. He asked us if we'd rather be hit now, when we knew it was coming, or wait and get hit at some arbitrary moment in the year. Perhaps there was a point to this, in terms of the history text he was teaching, but if so I missed the purpose of the exercise. I heard instead a possible threat. I told him to hit me, and then see what happened. I was a farm kid, and the menace sharpened my voice. Today a teacher wouldn't use such an example, whatever its pedagogical value. What persisted long after the moment passed, however, was my confrontational nature, especially when dealing with authority figures, and that continued to be a problem educationally.

Like Merriweather, Dr. David Givan and Dr. Margaret Corey were both weak-minded teachers, but they'd finished a PhD at the local university and that meant they needed to be addressed as doctor from that point forward. They lorded their degree over others, and although I knew little enough about what the degree entailed, I couldn't see any profound differences that separated them from their peers.

Givan taught English, and delighted in using words the students wouldn't know. I remember him showing off in front of his ignorant students by saying, "chance, hap, circumstance, providence, fortune." I recognized that his recitation of synonyms was gestural, as though the awe of students should be the main outcome, as if instruction was predicated on the use of obscure vocabulary. He bumped against the garbage can and then backed away, pretending to shoot it, in a spontaneous joke for the class. My friend related the same story from his class, and I realized that Givan was more interested in his ego than what the students needed to know. When a student received a perfect grade for memorizing a sonnet by reciting it aloud with the punctuation and pauses, I felt like Givan was aiming for the wrong pedagogical goals.

Although Corey had favourites amongst her students, who told me years later she was kind to them, I found her to be an intimidating and aggressive science teacher. I once asked her about directing sea water into the Sahara Desert to change the climate and flora of the region and she mocked the idea--I'd taken it from a science fiction book I'd read--and told me that plants need humus to grow. "How are you going to grow plants in sand?" She persisted in that line of questioning and intellectual bullying for some fifteen minutes. After her outburst, I said nothing more in her class. When I read about the agricultural potential of the Sahara years later--that all it needed was rainfall to bloom as it had ten thousand years earlier--I realized that she hadn't even known basic information about her own field. More significantly, I realized that she needed others to feel stupid before she could feel smart. Long before I knew what zero sum thinking meant, I was able to witness it in action.

Those lessons stayed with me, at least in terms of what to avoid when teaching, but they were accompanied by more positive influences. My later academic aspirations were at least partially owed to the inspiration offered by my English teacher Ken Leger, who went by the nickname Butch. He portrayed university as something which was possible, even for someone who didn't have either a stable family background or money. University was drinking with his friends, celebrating Robbie Burns' birthday by pouring a glass of whiskey into the mouth of his statue in a downtown park, and study was merely part of the experience. He never once pretended that university-level study was an academic or social impossibility for his students, and I have taken that lesson to heart ever since.

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