Nail Polish on Nickels
Here’s how I became an itinerant educator: my senior year of college, my mother asked, “What have you learned to do?” In a family of HVAC technicians and appliance repairmen, electricians and secretaries, I was the first person to go to a four-year college and the first person to come out of postsecondary education without a clear career path. Yet my education had taken twice as long and cost several times as much. The next week found me in an advisor’s office switching my major from English to Secondary English Education.
This tacked on a year of school, but it worked — I was offered a job at a rural high school where I’d conducted research during student teaching. It was the sort of job I’d been raised to seek, one I could have stayed at until I retired, but it felt like a trap. I turned it down for a gig through the sociology department whose only benefit was weekly travel. I learned to navigate airports and rental cars, learned to read maps, saw nearly every state in the lower fifty. The year after that I used my education degree as a springboard into a teach-abroad program in Thailand. Then a return to the States where I worked as a substitute teacher, a preschool teacher, a homeschool teacher, and more.
Decades passed, and one day it was time to take my only child on college tours. I’d never been on college tours, but I had, by this point, returned to grad school, gotten an MFA, and spent several years teaching as an adjunct in both face-to-face and online classrooms. College was a code I thought I’d cracked. On our first tour, as I listened to the student guide detail his extracurriculars (a listing more impressive than my resume) I recalled the timeshare spiels I’d sat through a time or two as a child. In exchange for pretending to be interested in a timeshare plan, our family scored a free vacation. I’d loved the ruse of it, the sense of camaraderie I felt with my parents and my brother at our clever manipulation of America’s vacation machinery. That I was surprised when college tours evoked this same sort of bald transactionality worried me — what was I missing? There was something I failed to understand.
My first college teaching job was on the satellite campus of a military junior college. The building where I taught had only four classrooms. When I started that job, I believed in the power of higher education to transform a life, and I believed in my capacity to prove myself through hard work. I would transform lives in the classroom, and this work would transform my life. Just as my brother had worked his way from technician to project manager, I would work my way into an associate professorship. I took every class offered to me, drove forty-five minutes to faculty meetings that were not mandatory but “strongly encouraged,” and sat on two committees.
I wasn’t unusual. The campus where I taught employed only adjuncts, and we’d all been promised a chance at full-time employment once enrollment hit some magic number. Benefits, retirement — we only had to attract enough students to have these things. We were a smart group, compassionate and dedicated. Exhausted. Each of us yearned for time to think deeply about the fields we loved. Perhaps I’m overstepping my boundaries in using the collective, but certainly I felt this way, and I often felt, as I chatted with another professor in the parking lot or between classes, that I was in the presence of kindred souls. We were buzzing with hunger and fantasy: two hours in an office all our own, pursuing original thought.
On that first college tour, I asked the student guide to share a key experience he’d had with a professor on campus. I wanted to hear, from a student’s perspective, what it was like to learn from the people generating prescient and challenging questions, questions that trickled into my classroom in the form of secondhand textbooks. Our guide’s answer was practiced, shiny, and perfect: a special internship a beloved professor had found for him the previous summer.
In my first year as an adjunct, I had a student who went by a nickname similar to “B.” B was a refugee from a country marked by civil war. He’d lost his mother tragically, and he’d spent a portion of his childhood in refugee camps. B was in my remedial writing class, and this was his third attempt. His Pell Grant didn’t fund a fourth. If he failed, he’d have to take out more loan money and try again, or quit college with only the debt he’d thus far accumulated.
The amount of debt my students accrued was staggering. I’d left my undergrad with some debt too, and I’d funded my graduate degree on loans, but always in the back of my mind was my mother’s voice reminding me that loans were a scam, a way for lenders to take your money, get rich by investing it, and then charge you extra for their opportunity. Her understanding of economics came from the hours she’d put in as a child dotting fingernail polish on the nickels her father collected from the machines at his laundromat. He kept track of how many times a nickel returned to him, how much more than five cents he could make off one coin. She taught me to compare the amount of money offered by lenders to my existing income, said not to borrow based on the future as the future was unknown.
B was in college because the grocery where he worked promised to promote him to manager if he got an associate’s degree. They even contributed a symbolic amount toward his tuition. B attended every class, never missed an assignment, and was the only student at the weekly study sessions I offered. By term’s end, he couldn’t craft a five-paragraph essay, but he’d proven that he would make an excellent manager. I wanted him to be able to write an essay; that’s why I’d spent time tutoring him. But more than this, I wanted America’s myth of meritocracy to prove true: I wanted his time and money to be well-spent; I wanted his experience to reflect his efforts; I wanted him to get his promotion at work.
One afternoon, I found a quiet moment with Dr. L, the other comp/lit adjunct on campus. Dr. L was a retired high school English teacher who lived in the same neighborhood as the college. She’d been the satellite’s first hire, and she’d helped with painting and prepping the building. She ran a school newspaper and took students to volunteer at the nearby community garden. I told her I wanted to pass B. “Do it,” she said. “We’re teaching the next generation. He’s learned enough in your class to help his children understand college.” She spoke of AP classes, SAT scores, extracurricular activities, student loan applications, core curriculum — the specialized language of undergraduate education. Dr. L recommended a hawk’s eye view, said to hold in sight the whole of valley and village.
On the college tours, my husband, son, and I were led past climbing walls, swimming pools, dorms with en-suite bathrooms. We saw presentations on study abroad programs, internships, and employment rates at graduation. The answers when I asked about students’ experiences with professors were always the same: a door opened or a path paved, some special opportunity. I wanted to hear of moments linked not to measurable success or the promise of accumulation, but to some quiet inner crumbling of illusion that reveals the world anew. Eventually, I realized that the fact I expected to hear of such an intimate experience from a twenty-year-old I put on the spot in front of the president’s office only revealed how deeply I’d internalized America’s transactionalization of all experience. Wisdom was the product I sought, so I expected it to be displayed for me, in public and impromptu, by a part-time employee. Or maybe not even that: some of the guides were volunteers, toiling for nothing but praise and recommendations. That special opportunity. I know because I asked that too.
I was still that suspicious, working class, first-gen college kid who’d applied sight unseen to the state university and the nearest technical college. But I was also a privileged, overbearing white mother fighting to get the best for her child. How had I become this latter creature given my fiscally unremarkable working life? Marriage and inheritance. When my husband’s grandmother died, he inherited stock. Ignoring the advice of a financial advisor, he slowly sold it bit by bit, socking the money away in a state college fund. Is this mismanagement? The answer lies in the uncertain future. We were unreasonably proud to take our child college shopping. He made a choice, and he got the sort of academic scholarship private schools are known for, an award that sounds like a lot but really only draws a line between rich and richer. My husband and I signed on the dotted line.
My child is labeled a “traditional student.” Traditional students are those who enter college immediately after high school. They’re unmarried, childless, and do not have to work full-time. They’re the ones benefiting from the study abroad programs, the internships. They’re the ones young enough to care about climbing walls and swimming pools. “Nontraditional” students encompass everyone else, a number that some estimates place as high as seventy-four percent of all undergraduates. If your dad died when you were twelve and you went off the rails for a bit, did a stint in juvie but emerged stronger for it, would now like to go to college and become a counselor and help kids like you once were, you’re nontraditional. If you got pregnant at sixteen and dropped out to be with your daughter but now she’s old enough for state pre-K and you have your GED in hand and want to return to your dream of being a dentist, you’re nontraditional. Or maybe your challenge was that your father didn’t inherit stock from his grandmother, and your mother won’t let you take on thousands of dollars of debt before the age of twenty-three, so you’ve had to live at home and work for a few years, saving money. Colleges and universities continue to cater to traditional students, even though what marks a traditional student is a rare and brilliant alignment of luck, timing, and privilege. Even unskilled, entry-level jobs now require “some college.” What this situation guarantees is debt, and, as my mother learned painting nail polish on nickels, debt benefits lenders. Banks. Corporations. The CEOs and CFOs whose children are America’s traditional students.
I don’t know if B finished his associate’s degree. He continued to struggle and transferred to another school. It wasn’t uncommon for students who didn’t do well at the public college where I taught to transfer to for-profit institutions. More degrees awarded; more debt incurred. Perhaps I shouldn’t have passed him. Maybe instead of taking the hawk’s eye view of Dr. L, I should’ve taken the mean and narrow gaze of the gatekeeper, communicated to B an unfitness, sent him home with only the debt he already carried. He still would’ve been able to help his children with the language of college, as Dr. L imagined — if he retained any belief in college as a worthy pursuit.
My son made his college decision midway through the nightmare of Trump’s presidency. One day, my brother and I were discussing family and childhood friends, Republicans all, who were becoming increasingly angry and delusional. We weren’t surprised by this, but we were disappointed. Heartbroken, even. We grieved together a lot during the Trump years. My brother has the sort of position I’ve lost the chance to attain: good salary, excellent benefits, strong retirement package. Five years an adjunct, always an adjunct — or so goes the water cooler wisdom — and I’m well past that mark. But during this particular conversation about Trump, my brother told me he was grateful for podcasts because they’d enabled him to get a college education while driving between job-sites. I was surprised. I couldn’t see much in my own life that spoke to the importance of postsecondary education. But if the podcasts he spoke of were university courses, they would fall under history and philosophy, race and gender studies. Like me, my brother believed the final purpose of higher education wasn’t employment or knowledge, but wisdom. “I’m for the people,” he said, revealing another understanding we shared: wisdom is synonymous with compassion.
Maybe this ideal my brother and I share of higher education as a liberalizing experience reflects nothing more than class naiveté. I went to career counseling when I was an undergrad English major, but only to find jobs on campus. I didn’t realize career counseling could have helped me with a postgrad job search, but then I hadn’t gone to college in search of a job. I went because books were where I’d first found a broader horizon than the one I was raised to see, and college was the place to go if you loved books.
Dr. L died at home in her easy chair, reading a book whose title I wish I knew. It was spring, mid-term. Her son dropped her overfull briefcase off at campus, and I took over her classes. Her students were grieving and wanted to share stories about her. There was a lot of laughter about the self she was at the community garden — nobody was allowed to touch her rake or her shovel, and she had no patience for those who failed to discern weed from crop. When a young woman talked of how kind Dr. L had been to her after her boyfriend accidentally killed himself playing Russian roulette, the class fell to silent, affirmative nods. Inside Dr. L’s briefcase were her lesson plans, her ungraded papers, and her most recent pay-stub. She made less than I did. This discovery fueled many realizations, perhaps the most relevant being this one: we both put in so many unpaid hours, but mine were in service of the institution — faculty meetings; committees — while hers — garden club; newspaper — were in service of the students.
The satellite campus where I began my career as an adjunct still employs only adjuncts.
Since I was an undergraduate, I’ve learned that there are many places to go for wisdom. Well-chosen elders. Spiritual leaders. Gardens and rivers and quiet mountain coves. Therapists. Retreat centers. Podcasts played through the scratchy speakers of a work van. Silence. In a culture like ours where everything is commodified — bodies, water, food, shelter, healthcare — and corporations have more rights than individuals, perhaps it’s dangerous to rely too heavily on institutions, especially when the qualities we seek are intangible, impossible to weigh and apportion. Maybe that liberalizing wisdom so often associated with college campuses is, in truth, a personal and daily practice. We must go inside and do the slow, quiet work of identifying that which cannot be commodified, and then nurture it, honor it. As John O’Donohue writes in his blessing, “For Equilibrium”:
As time remains free of all that it frames
May your mind stay clear of all that it names.
This, finally, is what I have spent my life seeking, and what I hope for my son, my students, each of us.
Ginger Eager’s first novel, The Nature of Remains, won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as a 2021 Books All Georgians Should Read. Her essays, short stories, and reviews have been published in journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, and West Branch. Ginger teaches in a variety of settings, including nonprofit writing centers and homeschool co-ops.