Public Forum: A special convocation

I had never attended convocation. I am not proud of that fact. These may be poor excuses, but for years I told myself that mid-June was such a busy time. It was the time of year that my daughter’s school was holding end of year concerts and parties; it was a time of year to recover from final marking and another year of teaching college English to approximately two hundred students. In my early years of teaching, twelve years ago, there was a good chance I’d already be knee-deep in teaching summer courses. Convocation was the last thing on my mind. So, for years, I ignored the form asking me what university I had graduated from and with what degree, so that the Registrar’s Office could order the appropriate gown and hood for me to wear at Convocation.

Until Nellie sent me the letter. Nellie Napartuk was a first semester student in my Introduction to College English class two years ago. I remembered her as shy, hard-working, with a big bright smile that occasionally shone from the back corner of the classroom. The first line of her letter said that she wasn’t even sure I’d remember her, but of course I did. It would be hard to forget Nellie.

Nellie is an Inuit student, one of four in that class, who comes from a small town in Nunavik called Umiujaq, population 300. She graduated in the French sector from Kiluutaq School and is now the school’s first post-secondary graduate.

John Abbott College has a well-established liaison with the Katavik School Board which operates in the north. In any given year, we will welcome a cohort of five to twenty-five Inuit students, many of them from small communities like Nellie’s, some from towns a bit larger.

Lynda Giguere, the Inuit Program Academic Assistance Counselor for Katavik, becomes like a guide and mentor to these students as they set forth on their cegep journey. We have a student body of approximately 5000 students, 125 times the population of Nellie’s hometown. The culture shock that these students experience coming south is immense.

Giguere says, “These students are my heroes. . . they have so much adapting to do. Not only is culture shock there but also academic and lifestyle

(including the weather!) shock with which they have to cope. They come south with a tremendous wealth of knowledge but it is not often transferable or useful down here. Furthermore, they come from very close-knit communities and so to come here and be away from their immediate support system puts their willingness to succeed to the test immediately.”

Nellie’s willingness was immediately apparent. She did what many students, not just those from Nunavit, find very difficult. She came for help. Nellie, along with one-third of her class, had failed her first college-level English analytical essay. It is a genre of essay the students have limited experience with in high school, so it is not unusual that they find the first one tough. All students have the option of rewriting, but they must come see me to go over the failed essay and begin working on a new outline.

I worry about failing, and therefore discouraging, the Inuit students. I am aware of how difficult the first few weeks in such a strange environment must be. They often look a bit shell-shocked in class. That, coupled with their natural shyness, can make connecting with these students a challenge. I had already lost one young man in the first week. I noticed he used a different name on his information sheet than the one on my class list. When I asked him why in class, his face turned beet red. I kicked myself under my desk; I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. I really was just curious, but he never returned.

I remember well the day Nellie came, failed essay in hand, speaking barely above a whisper, telling me she wanted help. Nellie went to French high school and did a year at Marie-Victorin cegep. Not only was she dealing with a north-south culture shock, but she was now being asked to compose extensive texts in English. The story she was analyzing was Audrey Thomas’s “In the Groove”, where a boy goes on a motorcycle trip with his self-absorbed hippy father, has a revelation about just how “elephantine” his dad’s ego really is, and is finally able to assert himself. It is a classic coming-of-age or initiation story.

Nellie herself was coming-of-age academically, and perhaps in other ways that I am not aware of, at John Abbott and indeed that day in my office. Most students find organizing an analytical essay around ideas which all relate to a central theme, and supporting them with quotations from the text, a difficult task. Students are more used to writing personal response, where they say whether they liked the story and how it related to their own lives. At this stage, we ask students to leave their own lives out of the equation and focus instead on the literary elements in the text and how these create meaning. It is a focus on ideas, not emotions.

That day, Nellie and I worked on an outline for about an hour to organize the ideas she wanted to develop on how the young boy, Josh, comes of age. She’d look at how he was young and rather helpless in the face of his father’s ego at the beginning, yet close enough to puberty that he didn’t want his father to see him naked. She’d go from there to how motorcycling itself was used as a metaphor for the father’s selfishness, how he liked to be in his own groove, riding in the front, in total control. Finally, she’d look at Josh’s epiphany, the split second when he realized he could have power over his father by reminding him of how his mother dumped him.

Like many students, once they realize that an essay has a shape, that all its supporting ideas expand or relate to the thesis, and that each supporting idea is developed with quotations that are analyzed and integrated, the light-bulb can go on. They see that the process isn’t random, that the separate pieces work to create a whole. That day, the light-bulb definitely went on for Nellie. She went home and wrote a passing and respectable rewrite. She didn’t fail another essay all semester.

In her letter to me, Nellie wrote, “It was pretty hard, but I managed to do it because you showed me how to do it. The best thing you’ve given me was how to write a good outline. You made me redo it a couple of times, and I’m sure, if you had never asked me to redo my paper, I would not have learned anything. Thank you so much, the tool you gave me was useful and I am proud to say I am graduating this June.”

It was the type of letter that makes an English teacher’s eyes well up and her skin goose pimple. In some way, we often work in the dark at the cegep level. Our classes can be so big, up to forty-five students (although Nellie’s had only 25) and we have the students for only 15 weeks. It is not the type of situation that fosters much bonding, although we do get to know some of our students better than others. I am lucky enough to live in the community I teach in, so I see my students everywhere. They put gas in my car, serve me at restaurants, coach my daughter in soccer, rip my ticket stubs at cinemas. I hardly ever remember a name, but never forget a face. Often, these students will tell me a tidbit about something they remember from my course, something that stayed with them. This is always gratifying. We all hope that we have had an impact and made a difference in our students’ lives.

Nellie’s was not the first letter I had received from a former student, but it was one of the most moving. Another story we read in that class was “Through the Tunnel” by Doris Lessing. It is a pretty standard 101 text, another classic coming-of-age story about a fatherless boy who wants to impress a group of older boys by swimming, like them, through a rock tunnel deep under water. The swim itself is portrayed as a birth, with Jerry flailing his limbs in the tight tunnel, fighting his way up to the light and air.

Nellie ended her letter with, “I still remember the story of the little boy swimming through the tunnel. . . . I now have gone through the tunnel, he he!” She certainly has. On the other side of Nellie’s tunnel are two wonderful options: her acceptance in Psychology at Bishop’s University and a job offer as a recruiter of candidates for the Kativik Regional Police. Whichever she chooses, I know Nellie will do well.

I sat a few rows behind Nellie at Convocation, although she didn’t see me at first. Because I hadn’t returned the form on time to the Registrar’s Office, I had to wear the gown of someone who didn’t show up. So I was a nurse from Pace University for the evening. I was overly aware of the blue hood strung across my back, making me feel like a bit of a phony. The thought of me administering needles and handling bodily fluids would make anyone who knows me howl with both fear and laughter. But I forgot all that when I saw Nellie. I had come for her. As the evening progressed, I realized I was there for many other students as well, many of whom I had just taught in a January intensive course. My two colleagues and I would chirp like proud mothers whenever a former student walked across the stage, as though we were somehow responsible.

I wanted a photo of Nellie receiving her college diploma (DEC), but just as she walked across the stage, a blond girl stood up, obliterating her. With my writer/English teacher’s mind I thought that might be a fitting metaphor for the struggles Nellie has ahead of her if she continues to live, study and work in the south. I knew I’d have to find her later to get a better picture.

As it turned out, she found me. She wanted to tell me that she had read the book I had given her, one of my own. She told me that she reads all the time now, that she has a big stack of books by her bed waiting to be read, that reading is better than TV – all music to an English teacher’s ears. I took her picture, hugged her again, and let her run off to find her mother.

What Nellie doesn’t know is that we experienced an initiation together that night. Not only was it my first John Abbott convocation. It was my first time in a black academic gown. I never attended my own cegep graduation, or any of my university graduations. The reasons why belong in another story, not this one. This is Nellie’s story. I am so glad I was part of it.



- Lori Weber is a Pointe Claire writer and English teacher at John Abbott College in Ste. Anne de Bellevue.