Willa, the English Teacher who Discovered How to Really Save Grandma
Interview #2 in the Teaching Climate Change Field Notes Series
One of the things I want to know in the Teaching Climate Change study is how college faculty came to their own understanding of the climate crisis. I myself went through 15 years in higher education (a BA, an MA, and a nine-year PhD) between 1990 and 2012. I learned not one single thing about climate change from a college professor: not in any subject, not at any level. I began studying sustainability education and climate change out of my own interests in about 2003, and made this gap in the curriculum the focus of my doctoral research in educational administration. It is true to this day that a student can graduate from most colleges without understanding climate science or the anticipated impacts to their future.
Talking with Willa, a fellow Rhet-Comp person, I described my own self-sought and self-taught understanding of the climate crisis as something like being trapped in a broken elevator. There is a freefall of learning, and then the cable catches and I think, “okay, this is something happening in 200 years” and then the elevator falls some more and catches and I think, “whoa, my children will see this” and then the elevator falls some more and I realize we are talking about My Lifetime and then actually Right Now. It feels like a very long elevator shaft in a very tall building, and the cable is about to snap.
So we started having that kind of conversation, around Willa’s round kitchen table. She offered me a beer, and showed me the allergy tincture medicines that she was brewing in a corner of the kitchen. She said, “my favorite thing as a child was to make potions….I wanted to fix people and heal people, but I went to an all girls school and they didn’t really focus on science, so starting in college I was like a thousand years behind.” Her chemistry teacher was a gatekeeper type. She switched to biology, and then geology. “At the time I was pretty spiritual and the teacher kind of dissed religion a whole bunch in front of me. And I was like, there’s no spirituality to this? There’s like a schism between science and religion….and I had to choose.”
For Willa, climate awareness started during her undergrad with a guest lecture by Vandana Shiva (“the Indian lady who talks about seeds”). “It was 2005 and they were like ‘Globalization is the word for your education.’ We talked about seeds, Monsanto, water rights. I don’t remember people taking about climate change but that is my earliest recollection of talking about the environment. It gutted me that companies could own seeds, could own our communal resources. And then we started talking about water rights, and that’s when I was outraged.” She remembers being a little kid, running outside in the rain with a cup to drink the rain. She remembers a time in the 80s where “we just had to stop doing that. No, no, no, you can’t drink the rain any more, there’s Acid Rain.”
Fast forward and Willa gets an MA in English and starts teaching composition classes at College of the Pacific. (“It happened in like 30 days, I get my dream job, get tenure track in two years, and full time work from then on.”) She was on a paddling team with a doctoral student from who was doing climate modeling. “I’d be like, so what did you do today? And she’d explain climate models to me….The grief that she has been dealing with with on a daily basis for the last decade is so big that she’s shutting her feelings down. She said, she finds herself laughing at things.” Willa now understands how her friend felt, and what all those models were about.
My friends don’t want to talk to me. People make jokes about me. They’re like “every time I talk to you this is all you bring up” … I thought we were talking about our students’ future? I thought we were preparing them for the future! Why are we having these conversation about SLOs? Why aren’t we talking about Water?”
Why can’t little kids run around in the rain with cups?
She finally pieces it all together around 2017, with “the whole fake news thing.” As an English teacher, research writing was in her wheelhouse, and she started teaching students how to discern valid sources. “Students were pulling up crazy things and thinking it was real.” Buzzfeed identified the biggest fake news stories of the year and they were all about climate change.
“I realized not only were people going out of their way to argue that it wasn’t real, and then there was this religion science standoff and I was like, here we are again. And then I understood. I saw how manipulative the religious right could be and how I had been crushed under the weight of having to believe what I’d been told by my religious leaders to save my soul….They’re doing it at a spiritual level. Their souls depend on it, and if they’re in that deep… to them, this is not the real world. This is the veil of clay.”
This is a spiritual battle between good and evil.
Willa compares learning about climate change to the way tobacco companies covered up the harm of cigarette smoking for as long as possible. She started reading essays from a app called Pocket. “I’m reading the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, I mean, how is everybody else not reading this?… National Geographic, Vice, The Atlantic, The Guardian….I started reading about catastrophes, the Keeling curve, but it was really tied to fake news. I was just teaching them how to do better research.”
When smart, trained researchers like Willa, or David Wallace Wells, or Jem Bendell, start synthesizing what scientists have been saying, the scenarios quickly become overwhelming. Unbearable. Uninhabitable. Scientists are trained to isolate, but humanities people are trained to feel things. Me and Willa’s conversation turns into a kind of litany of doom: 1–8 feet sea level rise by 2100, unless Greenland melts and it’s 22 feet by 2100, and the Amazon on fire and permafrost like a carbon bomb…and pandemics, hurricanes, and Micronesians with noplace to go and nowhere to live, and no beaches, and no grid, and NO PLAN. She describes it like a bubbling sensation,
Once I get going it keeps coming out…am I hitting my students too fast or too hard? We’ve got to just drink this in and get through those stages of grief and get to acceptance. We gotta be strong, We have to get super strong, super brave. Emotionally, physically…we gotta get real smart real fast and start getting really creative and we need the younger generation to help us.
Just as she was told, in college, that Globalization was the word for her generation, now she says it’s Sustainability, for the current generation of college students. “Sustainability shouldn’t be a club. It shouldn’t be the last thing our administrators think about. Our counselors need to know about this…”
Willa and I could talk about climate change, sustainability, teaching, and the university for hours. But the beers are gone and it’s time for normal life to resume. She has dinner plans at a vegan sushi restaurant. Her boyfriend, a sustenance hunter, repairer of boat engines, welder, “the most able-bodied man I never knew I needed” ridicules the concept of expensive vegan sushi, but it’s a girls-night-out kind of thing.
“I’ve found my reason now,” she says. A reason for living, and for being a teacher. “I always wanted to be a good person but, I mean, teaching essay writing? Really? Do commas really save lives? I mean: ‘let’s eat Grandma!’ No, ‘let’s eat, grandma!’… I mean: a comma might save grandma’s life but in reality….”
Turns out English 100 might actually save your life, or at least change it.
This interview is part of a research study, Teaching Climate Change, designed to understand what college faculty know, think, feel, and do about climate change in the classroom. I describe the project and the purpose of open field notes in an introductory post. All names and places are pseudonyms (except, of course Vandana Shiva, David Wallace Wells, and Jem Bendell.) I welcome comments, questions, and thoughts about the role of college faculty in teaching to these times.
