Quotes from Conference Presenters:

“… worked on the Erie Lackawanna trains and in a town in New York famous for IBM & Florsheim shoes…”

“… my friend John Sullivan would not ‘get out of town’ though he hated the bottling factory.” Gerald says of himself, “Me? I got out of town. ”

“Jill tries to act middle class in high school, to have boyfriends (no sweater sets); in college (by contrast) she finds working class colleagues unlike the h.s. working class girls: We’re on scholarship, poor, we take the hard courses; we come from the wrong cities… she wants to pass, but at the same time she does not wish to be labeled with any class identifying name…” commenting on Braided Lives by Marge Piercy

“Esperanza has a mother who helps her negotiate her middle class leap as only part of who she is and only part of the actual experience. Her mother tells her that her life is a circle which transcends class-straddling, ‘You will always be Esperanza.’ ” commenting on The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

“William Titus’s play Sit Down! came from interviews with strikers; i.e. the Flint autoworkers strikers vs. GM. The play was often performed by workers themselves in order to inform and persuade other workers. These Chautauqua performances stirred other workers. “

“Neruda and Garcia-Lorca are the writers I look to. They wrote to the audience who understood what they said and who lived the life they were writing about. ”

“I struggled. I wanted to educate the middle class, putting in footnotes about educational context and taking footnotes out again. Then again, I wanted to write a book accessible to my relatives, but they told me not to worry; it would never be accessible. And then I stopped worrying. Hey! My family is not the audience to whom I am writing. I am both an academic & the tough kid from Fridley, and that’s what I’ll write about…”

“… the old definition – the violence of classism borne by the worker vs. green jobs, the new kind such as computer jobs. Students boast that the green jobs benefit both worker and owner alike. Can there be a coalition of classes toward finding solutions for society? So, what is class analysis? A study of class struggle, therefore class matters because class struggle matters.”

“… unions had changed. Members moved out to the suburbs, the brothers weren’t all living in the same neighborhood, their wives were not stay-at-home wives, and I began to see that the union members did not socialize with each other outside of work as they had when I was an apprentice and a young journeyman…”

“They forgot why they were in a union (to help each other). They didn’t help new workers, they bickered about overtime and criticized each other… In a phrase, they got greedy. In 1974, that was not the case. The bus garage then was 75% African American, 25% white; and the company that hired them treated them all in an ignorant fashion. Black workers were called the N-word and white ones were called white trash. ”

“… a final quote from Milton Rogovin, photographer and poet, self-identified as The Picture Man:
‘Anna & I were determined that we would go back and back and show that these were regular people like the rest of us. And we must not abandon them.’ ”

from Jan Beatty’s poem: A Waitress’ Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up & Don’t Waste My Time
20% minimum as long as the waitress doesn’t inflict bodily harm
If you’re two people at a four top, tip extra //If you sit a long time, pay rent…”

“And I invite everyone here at open mike to come on downtown to Sen. Spector’s office tomorrow to help persuade him that you don’t accept union money and then turn around and screw the unions…”

“The teacher’s role is epistemic = to ask questions … not a Declarative role, an Interrogative one. It may be useful to say, ‘Would you repeat what you just said?’ This puts students into a dialogue with one another, not into a session where they’ve gotta prove themselves right to the teacher … If there are repressed responses, those who can’t speak can listen and be the audience …”

the ghostly Cathedral
of Learning triumphing over the Mellon Institute
it will be in