Conference

I hate conferences.

It seems like the bad always outweighs the good. I recently attended the state adult education conference, and met/fought with people who were supposed to be high on the totem pole of adult ed. They're dumbasses. I have post traumatic conference syndrome. There is such a ridiculous difference between state paid workers and the rest of us.

For the first day, I sat through Ruby Payne training (which we were calling Payne-ful Training), and while it was long, it was very, very good. She's the founder of aha!process, which specializes in working with children from a culture of poverty. The gist of the training was that in order to better understand those we want to help, we need to understand that the culture of poverty works very differently than middle class culture; in order to break the cycle of poverty, we as service providers need to clue in to the rules that each culture is operating under in order to help the adults we serve make the jump from poverty to middle class. It's a good training, because so often we don't realize that we approach things from a middle class point of view.

For example, the middle class plans for the future while the culture of poverty lives day to day, for survival, essentially. Knowing how generational poverty works keeps us from saying things like "He just doesn't want to work" to saying "He doesn't have the skills to work this job, and that's why he quits after two weeks and blames it on the boss." It isn't passing the buck of individual responsibility; rather, it's recognizing that individual responsibility is a middle class ideal, and that poverty culture works on the principle of what's best for the family group. There were plenty of examples, and if you're really curious, you should check out her book . There are plenty of people who disagree with her research, but I have to say, from working firsthand with generational poverty, she's pretty spot on. Her citation method is weird, but that doesn't discount what she brings to the table.

Except, of course, if you're a self-righteous, overpaid bunch of jerks who really don't give a shit about serving anybody. Then you'd probably have a big problem with the idea.

While I was sitting through a session on getting the adults we serve to be more creative and critical thinkers, I was absolutely bored to tears. The material was full of euphemisms like "Think outside of the box!" Can anybody honestly describe what that actually means? And if everybody is trying to think outside of the box, doesn't that mean that nobody is really thinking outside of the box, but that we're all trying to be "unconventional" instead? When I finally heard this tripe, I had to blurt my piece out: "Teach them to go ahead and ask--what's the worst that can happen? All you'll get is a 'no', and then you're no worse off than when you started."

Sometimes that's the absolute worst place to be. Everyone turns around. I went through a small spiel about Ruby Payne training and understanding the culture of poverty, which didn't value planning ahead, and how could we better translate these ideas to the poverty class so that we can give them the hidden rules and tools to becoming middle class?

Shock and outrage. The answer from 9/10 of the room was that apparently we don't want them to become middle class. How dare we presume to foist our class on "those people"? We're certainly NOT of a certain "class", no way, nohow. And you know, people sometimes don't really know they're poor until someone points it out to them.

I called bullshit. Outloud. People know damned well when they're poor. They know when they can't pay the bills or have to go to a food bank at the end of the month because they can't stretch their food budget. It's also bullshit that we don't want them to become middle class. Higher education is a fucking middle class idea! It isn't the wealthy's idea. They go to school to make connections. It certainly wasn't the poor's idea, or they wouldn't be poor and uneducated, now would they?

I got more garbage about how they didn't consider themselves any class at all. To which I called more bullshit outloud. People who disregard class are simply blind to how class plays a roll in everyday life. You can claim it isn't there--that just makes you stupid. Yea, that went over well. But I was on a roll now. I pointed out that one of the primary things DHHR makes them go after is child support. Now, if we don't care about class, why would we make them pursue a middle class value like increasing your income base? Why would we bother offering GED classes? Every value we teach them from how to dress on the job to their etiquette on the job are middle class values. To claim that's not what you want to do is to deny what you're actually doing.

Some broad shot her mouth off about how there were just some people who didn't want to work; one man quit every job they placed him in after two weeks, claiming he just didn't get along with the boss. She declared he was just lazy and some of them are lazy and class has nothing to do with it. So I shot back, are you sure he was literate enough to do the job? That spun some heads back around. 20% of our adults are functionally illiterate, and there's another undocumented segment who actually have a high school diploma and still can't read. We've been in a crisis since the 70s, and nothing they've done has changed that. Did it ever occur to them that if they don't understand the culture of their clients, that they're going to continue with this crisis? Blank stares.

Oh, right. I guess it's probably good for business. If you want to keep your job, we should probably just let things go the way they are. Otherwise you'd be out of work, if people could actually read and better their lives.

One woman gave me the stink eye for the rest of the conference week. Was I bitchy about it? Yes, I sure as hell was. To see, for instance, one of the heads of Adult Ed in the state sitting there with gold cuff links and an expensive watch, paid for by me, thank you very much, knowing that under his watch he let adult ed go straight to hell pissed me off. Get on with it or get the hell out of the way and let someone else have a turn. These people don't admit anyone into their GED classes unless they're sure they have a good chance of passing the test--because it fucks up their numbers otherwise. They can show high success rates, but in reality, the people they toss to the side end up coming to my agency because they have no other help to go to.

Sometimes I think that the whole adult basic ed (ABE) thing should be opened up to private companies, but that has its flaws, too. I've worked two different government contracts issued to two different private companies--one for immigration and one for the Brady Bill--and there is no job security, pay is low, and benefits are shitty. Every 2-4 years, the corporation has to bid for the project again, so you could be out of a job before you know it. Management tends to be an absolute bastard, because they get paid by the unit, so you have to really churn it out to make profit. We were still a hell of a lot more effective and far less sadistic than the government immigration officials working at the airport or at the state offices. But as far as workers go, they get the better deal. As far as services went, they're not the best provider.

Something needs to change, or the state of adult ed is going to continue the way it is now--run by dumbasses with gold cuff links. Where are the other people who want to throw bricks at the system?? It's actually kind of fun, once your rage simmers down to a boil...

-- Virgil