When Susan Woodring, author of Goliath (St. Martin’s Press) told me she wanted to contribute to workerwrites, I was thrilled. In addition to Susan’s deft characterization of Goliath’s 
working class, Susan is a long-time fan of Studs Terkel. Here Susan shares a personal story that Studs would have have loved. I hope you do, too.
The summer between graduating high school and leaving for college, I worked two part-time jobs. One I loved. I was a floater at a daycare, filling in wherever and whenever an extra hand was needed. I spent my days playing hide-and-go-seek with the 18-month-olds, diapering infants, and keeping order on the 4-year-old bus on its weekly excursions to the movies or the park.
My other job was at a fabric store, measuring and cutting cloth for customers. This job I hated. The customers were exacting—fussy—in a way that made 18-year-old me want to roll my eyes. I handled enormous bolts of upholstery cloth. I stood on a concrete-beneath-rubber-tile floor until my legs ached and my feet swelled. There I was, me in my last few months of adolescence, wearing a company-issue polyester smock with a pair of scissors and a measuring tape tucked into the pocket. I knew nothing about sewing, or about the fabric I was measuring. I couldn’t read a Butterick pattern to save my life. Me, ho-hum, leaning against my fabric-cutting counter, waiting, waiting, waiting for my shift to be over.
I was young and energetic and idealistic in ways that both hearten me now, looking back, and make me want to roll my much older eyes. I can remember quite clearly thinking, as I willed those long hours to pass, that I should never do what I was doing. I should never will time to pass. Even at that young age I realized the stuff—time—was finite. That time is life. And so after a few weeks, I quit.
I didn’t mind hard work—my job at the daycare was exhausting—but I believed, without saying so, that I had a right to a job that challenged me…at least a little. Dealing with defiant two-year-olds and a mini chicken-pox epidemic was no picnic, but at least there was the satisfaction of soothing the infant back to sleep or brokering peace between two warring three-year-olds. Yes, I had to mop dried-up peanut-butter off the floor while the toddlers slept, and yes, I dealt with more than my share of tiny people’s various unsightly bodily expulsions, but I was happy with the variety my job offered me. Every day was different, and I loved that.
Five years later, I’d earned a Bachelors of Education degree, worked a year abroad teaching English as a Foreign Language, and was settling into a full-time middle school teaching job in Caldwell County, a small furniture– and textile-producing county in the foothills of North Carolina. There, I learned a truism about the teaching life that extends to my current job as a homeschooling mom: the days were long but the periods flew by much too quickly.
Each day felt like a mini-lifetime, as if I’d hatched there, in my before-students classroom, the light through the window still weak, a very strong and very bad cup of coffee in my hand. I hustled through my days, rushing to get all the paperwork done, the lessons planned, my copies made. I left late each afternoon with blue and green vis-à-vis ink staining my fingers, my bones and mind and patience wearied, my feet throbbing with a pain similar to that of my fabric-store days.
And yet, the difference was that I hadn’t felt the pain accumulating over the day as I stood on the hard showroom floor, watching the clock. Instead, the aching came at the end of the day when my classroom had emptied, all my raucous little thirteen-year-olds tumbling out into the halls, onto the buses. When I could go ahead and put my feet up and dive into a pile of eighth-grade essays on what they had learned about life from a Ray Bradbury story we’d read in class.
I had been raised to believe teaching was something of a martyr’s job. That the pay wasn’t good, that this career demands a lot from you and doesn’t confer the kind of respect and esteem other equally-demanding professions offer. I’d heard these things from my teachers and my parents. I was deemed something of a saint, going into education. This was during a time when my state suffered from a teacher shortage. “Especially good teachers,” people were always saying.
With the exception of my being a saint, all of this is true. Teaching is tough. You are expected to work miracles with limited resources and often insufficient support from parents, administrators, and state– and local-level decision-makers. The kids are often disrespectful and sometimes, very, very rough. Teaching can be an extremely dangerous job. But, I was working in a factory town. Teachers were among the best-educated, best-paid segment of the population. Most of my students’ parents worked in those factories. They would come to after-school meetings with tired, red-rimmed eyes. I imagined their sore feet hadn’t come on them suddenly at the end of the day as mine did. I imagined they’d felt their exhaustion building all day long—something like my long-ago fabric-cutting days.
But worse, of course. The exhaustion my students’ parents felt was much worse. I had had worked at my cutting table a few days a week for about a month. These people had worked on one factory line or another for years, and there was no end in sight. Except that they never knew when their job at the factory, the furniture industry dwindling away, would vanish altogether.
I was merely twenty-three and only then really thinking about what work is like for so many people in this world. For my students’ parents, work meant a floor manager watching over you, much like the fussy ladies I used to cut cloth for. It meant bending your back over a hot, cranky machine for hours on end. It meant pushing a piece of rough wood through a massive cutter. It meant the smell of varnish and furniture glue always in your hair. It meant counting washers and bolts and handles to slide into a dresser drawer inside a bureau on its way to market. It meant doing these things day after day, year after year, and not having the luxury of reprimanding oneself: I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be wasting time–life.
Work, at its best, edifies the worker. It challenges. It gives purpose, a sense of accomplishment. It feeds us, both physically and psychologically. It provides for that life I once stood in a fabric store and worried—naively but also rightly, in a way, too—about squandering.
(Please read more about Susan Woodring and her work on Guest Blogger Bios page.)
