[EDLING:601] Stanford English Tutoring program Helps Make a Janitor Less Invisible

[Francis M Hult]

By way of the Language Policy List...

> >From the NYTimes,
>
> January 26, 2005
> ON EDUCATION
> At Stanford, Tutoring Helps Make a Janitor Less Invisible
> By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
>
> PALO ALTO, Calif.
>
> DOROTEO GARCIA worked his usual morning shift as a janitor in the art
> museum, set along the palm-lined promenade leading into the Stanford
> University campus. Hours before the doors opened and the tourists arrived,
> he moved nimbly in heavy work boots, well practiced in making himself
> unobtrusive and being ignored. He passed amid the Egyptian mummy case and
> Zulu beadwork, the silver dragons from China and the Rodin bronzes, all
> those treasures, vacuuming carpets, mopping floors, dusting shelves,
> sponging tables, emptying garbage cans, scrubbing toilets. He earns $10.14
> an hour at a university whose students pay nearly $40,000 a year in
> tuition, fees, and room and board.
>
> Then lunch break came on this blustery January day and Mr. Garcia zipped
> up his jacket and headed for his English lesson. Through the arches and
> across the tiled arcades of the campus, this hacienda with skateboards and
> latte, he reached El Centro Chicano, the hub for Stanford's Hispanic
> students. Eric Eldon, the Stanford senior who tutored him, was waiting.
> They sat in a small conference room with posters of Cesar Chavez, the late
> leader of the United Farm Workers, and opened a binder of lessons. Today's
> was titled "Making Requests." With his high rounded cheeks and hooked
> nose, Mr. Garcia had a profile like something from a bas-relief at Chichn
> Itz. Mr. Eldon, with spiky black hair, scruffy beard and very horizontal
> glasses, looked more like a character from a Gus Van Sant or Richard
> Linklater film.
>
> An immigrant father, age 41, and an American-born student of 23, they bent
> together over a list of "polite expressions" for a janitor to use with his
> boss. They lingered over the phrase "Can I bother you?" as Mr. Eldon
> explained that, yes, bothering someone is usually impolite, but in this
> sentence meant something more like, "Is it O.K. if I ask you?" They went
> through dialogues of a Stanford faculty or staff member requesting a
> janitor's help. Before the lunch break ended, Mr. Garcia was on the final
> page of the lesson, developing a more sophisticated kind of request - a
> letter to the governor of California on the issue of allowing undocumented
> immigrants to obtain a driver's license. Hardly anyone around Stanford
> beside Mr. Eldon knew it, but Mr. Garcia had grown up in Mexico reading
> the political novels and essays of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel
> Garca Mrquez.  When you are a janitor in a university of affluence, a
> university of soft hands, there are a lot of things people don't know
> about you.
>
> Bridging that divide was one of the major reasons for creating the
> tutoring program at Stanford and several other campuses in the Bay Area.
> Jointly operated by student volunteers, janitorial contractors and Local
> 1877 of the Service Employees International Union, the project brings
> together as many as 55 pairs of janitors and students at Stanford. For
> the union and its members, 85 percent of them immigrants from Mexico and
> Central America, the English classes meet both immediate and long-range
> goals. Learning even the rudiments of English can save a janitor from
> being fired for not responding to a request he does not understand. With
> some fluency, a janitor can get off the night shift and onto days. A
> rank-and-file janitor can try to become a shop steward. An immigrant can
> try to pass the citizenship test.
>
> For the Stanford students, meanwhile, the tutoring provides a sense of
> purpose and human connection that cannot be taught. Many of these
> undergraduates won admission partly by doing "community service" for the
> most cynical of reasons, to build their rsums. Their courses here resound
> with the armchair radicalism of Orientalism, neocolonialism,
> deconstructionism, white studies, critical race theory, queer theory, blah
> blah blah. "There's a lot of privilege in this place and a lot of
> ignorance about that privilege," Mr. Eldon said. "People are used to
> having maids and servants. If they trash their dorm, they're used to
> having someone else clean it up." He continued, "You can take classes on
> all sorts of highfalutin political theories and trends. But to me, none of
> them teaches as much as being connected to people outside of Stanford."
>
> Fittingly, then, the tutoring program arose from an alliance between Local
> 1877 and Stanford students as the union was engaged in several bitter
> rounds of contract negotiations in 2000. One outcome of the union's
> organizing efforts statewide, meanwhile, was the establishment of an
> educational trust fund, with employers contributing one cent for each hour
> worked by each janitor. Local 1877 put its share of the fund toward the
> tutoring system, both at colleges and high-tech companies (where paid
> teachers lead the literacy classes). Most of the project's current budget
> of $500,000 a year, though, comes from state aid.
>
> IN the three years that Mr. Eldon has known Mr. Garcia, three years of
> barbecues and soccer games as well as English lessons, the student has
> crossed the actual and metaphorical divide between Palo Alto and its
> hardscrabble neighbor, East Palo Alto. There, beyond 101 freeway, Mr.
> Garcia splits a one-room apartment with his son Ernesto, a Stanford
> janitor and community-college student. His wife and younger son remain in
> Oaxaca. Mr. Garcia keeps his snapshots of them on the wall, and he keeps a
> native Mexican cactus outside the front door.
>
> Sometimes, in sentimental moments, Mr. Garcia writes poetry about the
> people and place he left nine years ago. At a distance, it is easy to
> remember the good parts, not the failed economy that sent him from high
> school into the farm fields, from the depleted fields into town to sell
> tools, and from town to El Norte.
>
> After nearly four years of tutoring, Mr. Garcia has become at least a bit
> less invisible. He has spoken to incoming freshmen as part of orientation.
> He wrote an op-ed column for the student newspaper. And he has even
> written a poem about his time on the night shift that is now part of the
> curriculum for his fellow janitors. It reads in part:
>
> He doesn't carry books or binders
>
> He uses a mop and feather duster
>
> Instead of a computer
>
> he works with a vacuum
>
> He keeps the university clean
>
> while everyone else sleeps...
>
> But now at one in the morning
>
> a janitor dreams while awake
>
> hoping for a better future
>
> for his kids.
>
>
> E-mail: sgfreedman at nytimes.com
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/education/26education.html