A few remarks on class in America, or on the importance of subtext

I was lucky in high school. There were differences in social class, wealth, opportunities, and power, but no one pretended that those differences didn't matter. We had a lot of school spirit and while it wasn't a panacea, a number of us wanted to raise each other up.

In fact, that blinded me. I went to college almost completely unaware of what anyone else's life was like. Or what they had to overcome or deal with. To be sure, I wasn't a complete ignoramus. I had roommates whose parents struggled in sweatshops to put food on the table. I knew their achievements were incredible, that nothing I did could compare. But I had no idea how much some people had. Toward the end of my fourth year in college, someone mentioned a fraternity which had regular housekeeping and cars from countries I didn't know existed. I remember feeling there were other worlds in a place I had struggled for three years to understand and belong in. I remember feeling I had seen nothing, that I had trapped myself in my own imagination, and I wasn't imagining all that much.

So I'm asking you to read Alexander Chee's "The Mysterious Art of Teaching." And I need you to do me another favor. I need you to think beyond high school, but not immediately envision money, a job, family, success. That won't work for this exercise. Nor will picturing yourself as someone who has a lot of opinions on interest rates, deregulation, or health savings accounts. There's nothing wrong with those concerns, but they don't address a deeper kind of growth, where maturity entails the realization that maybe nothing works the way we assume.

What I'm looking for you to think about is how school doesn't even work the way we think it does. Like, we fight to get an A in English. Does that mean we're writers? We can write War and Peace 2? Coach loves what I'm doing in softball. Does that mean I can be an Olympian? This isn't to say that what we do in school lacks value – far from it. I can safely tell you I always have students who are amazing leaders. They know how to find value in their education in ways I am catching up to.

In the case of "The Mysterious Art of Teaching," I'd like you to look at that first sentence. "I graduated from Wesleyan in 1989 as an English major with a B+ average and returned in the fall of 2002 as a visiting writer after the publication of my first novel." I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you live in West Texas, and so Wesleyan isn't something you're terribly familiar with. We have UT, a football powerhouse with a 40 billion dollar endowment, world class academic departments, and members of the Texas elite fighting each other to get into. Social class is a very real concern at UT. Many families feel entitled to go there. We don't really talk about this; we focus on those who are automatically admitted. We want to believe the cheerocracy is a meritocracy.

Wesleyan is a different world than UT and also the same. It has a 1.5 billion dollar endowment, which sounds tiny, but is 1.5 billion dollars. 1000 million plus 500 million dollars all of which generate interest for the school to live on. Let's say it returned, conservatively, 3%. That is 45 million dollars. The school has about 3000 students. I have not even thought about tuition charged or other gifts received.

Part of the problem with explaining social class and wealth to you is that I'm not entirely sure how it all works. These are dizzying sums of money and I don't know how exactly opportunities are had and benefits for some created. But I'd imagine that a school which currently costs $92,994 as of 9/30/2024 to attend is not a place where a B+ average is good. It's more than likely a sign that someone is telling you that you don't belong in a particular major. There are others believed to be better.

Which, honestly, makes my mind melt. Look at this exchange between Chee and his former teacher:

In the fall of 2002, for example, I approached Khachig Tololyan, an English professor whose class on the Novel as History had a profound impact on me. I explained to him that the books he taught had influenced my own work on my first novel. He laughed.

“I remember you,” he said, “as an erratic student. What I remember thinking is that there was a lot you weren’t saying. That you were alternately paying attention and then very far away.”

Here's a student (Chee) saying thank you for a class I'd like to take just to know what it was about. Chee took the class and told his teacher "the books he taught had influenced [his] own work on [his] first novel." As a response, he is told that he was "erratic" (undependable, not serious. this doesn't usually describe someone who can finish a novel) and "alternately paying attention and then very far away" (some might hear overtones of the term "space cadet" here, and I wouldn't blame them).

Every time I teach "The Mysterious Art of Teaching" I get responses like this: "Chee was a bad student and should have paid more attention." I'm not sure how to respond when someone is taking the time to say "I was putting in the thought and effort to write my own novel and my teachers did not pick up on this." I don't know how to demonstrate that recognition is not the same as doing the work. Chee did the work and was unrecognized. I suspect some are frightened this could be possible. That, in fact, one could do the right work–the work that changes the world (yes, this is what a good book does)–and have virtually no one else in their corner. A B+ average is the program's way of saying "we're not going to bother telling our alumni in the publishing business about you."

I'm not sure how to respond when someone points out the realities of class, realities we don't like to think about, and others are going "whatever." Not much later in the essay, Chee finds a comment his teacher left on one of his papers, a comment that is literally angry his papers do not evince enjoyment of writing a paper. This is one reality of social class: someone thinks you are insufficiently grateful enough and projects this supposed ungratefulness onto you. It doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter that you're doing all the work, it may not even matter what you achieve. You are marked as someone who could not possibly be grateful.

Someone might read this and think "none of this stuff matters." They don't want to be a writer. They know they're going to make a ton of money and that's it. That's the win. There's family and friends, they just need the right job and everything's good. How do I explain that the only thing worse than being aware of class in America is being completely unaware of it? Right now, a certain city struggles with having drinkable water because the city will not pass a bond for fixing the pipes. It's too expensive, they say, and you'll note that people of meager or modest means are hit hard by a lack of water they can use. Those who can afford to wait for land values to decrease, however, may benefit from a distressed water system. Awareness of class is awareness of power. If you don't know who has power, what power do you have?