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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Stories

Responses to My Piece in The Atlantic

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Why Making College Free Isn’t Enough for First-Generation Students", Assumptions, Class-Based Assumptions, Comments, First-Generation Students, Higher Education, Hillary Clinton, Intentions, Nitpicking, Racial Assumptions, Responses, Stories, The Atlantic


On Labor Day last week, The Atlantic ran my piece “Why Making College Free Isn’t Enough for First-Generation Students.” It was a culmination of thoughts I had gleaned from the latest, research, from working on education issues in the nonprofit world, from my time as a professor at various universities, from my own college journey, and is in some ways, a summary of Boy @ The Window.

The response over the past week has been much more than I expected. It was definitely overwhelming in terms of the number of people who shared their own first-generation stories. I found myself wading through emails, nodding my head in agreement or shaking my head at the crap that some of my readers had to put up with to attend and graduate from college. These emails — as well as comments on the article on The Atlantic website — made all of the work putting the article together worth it.

A couple of stories stuck out for me. One was from a first-generation student who attended college a few years before my own 1987-91 run at the bachelor’s.

I read your article in the Atlantic, I was shocked at the similarity of our college experience. I like the Columbia investigation tale, they told me they didn’t believe me that my family income was so modest…Georgetown offered me the most money. I went to Georgetown in 1982, graduated in 1987, was homeless for a time, embarrassed about my modest financial background, grew up very fast in all areas, to enable completion of my studies.

Among the things that struck me was the shame of poverty the person felt then and years later. Living in a country like the US, with the constant mantra of hard work, faith, and ability all lead to prosperity, means that anyone not doing well might as well be a laughingstock standing naked in front of their high school graduating class. Or should contemplate committing suicide. It shouldn’t be purely on first-generation students to open up about their experiences before universities and states put resources into leadership and youth development organizations, mental health services, and fully-funded, need-based aid beyond tuition (covering food, housing, and books) to maximize opportunities for this increasingly larger group of college students.

I know the unofficial rule about not reading comments sections for articles, especially if the article happens to be your own. But given the personal nature of “Why Making College Free Isn’t Enough for First-Generation Students,” I wanted to see what folks had to say. Some accused me of self-aggrandizement, of “patting myself on the back” for having graduated with a degree from Pitt in four years. Another went on to call me “exceptional,” that most “sixth-generation” students couldn’t have done what I did. Both comments seemed vaguely envious. I took no joy in writing about being homeless for five days. Especially since I knew so many others under similar circumstances haven’t completed their degrees.

Some of the comments I received on Twitter were of the nitpicking variety. One was from an education professor whom told me to “read her book” because I didn’t nuance the fact that non-financial aid programs for first-generation students cost money and other resources. Really? No kidding! Another pointed out there were more aspects to Hillary Clinton’s higher education plan than free college tuition, while a third commented that I didn’t discuss Pell Grants as part of my financial aid packages. All true, but given the comprehensive nature of the piece, I didn’t think it necessary to write a magnum opus or someone else’s version of combining my experiences with today’s data on first-generation students.

Many of the comments in The Atlantic’s Comments section, though, were of the more stereotyping variety. Comments about my Mom as undeserving of welfare because of the number of kids she had. Comments about my father’s alcoholism. Assumptions that because my father wasn’t in the household, that I lived in a “broken home.” Stereotypes about affirmative action, about “big government,” about “welfare cheats” versus law-abiding “tax payers.” I could address all of these well-meaning race-baiters one-by-one, but I’ve challenged these assumptions in the piece and even in my blog, anyway.

One of my readers emailed me in expressing their assumptions about me and about first-generation students in general.

What makes sense is for first-generation students to go to colleges more oriented toward their needs, even if those colleges are less ‘competitive.’

Navigating a huge bureaucracy isn’t easy for anyone. What it takes is the emotional strength that comes from being raised in a functional, intact home…But rising up the ladder has to be seen as, for most, a gradual process, not a “rags to riches” one.

I guess this person missed the part where I noted that 50 percent of all first-generation students are White, and that technically, I did live in a home with either my father and my Mom or my idiot stepfather and my Mom growing up. Part of the problem in understanding the needs of first-generations students, though, are people like this reader, many of whom are college administrators who also make sweeping assumptions about students who aren’t middle class and White. Heck, the main indicator of success for students is parent’s income and wealth, not hard work, ability, or whether their parents live together or face substance abuse issues.

And that’s kind of the point another emailer made about her own college journey as a first-generation student.

I went off to a private college — which I picked without any idea about getting a job or learning a profession. My mother…naively believed that a degree would guarantee I would be more employable. I was one of maybe 2 scholarship students on my small campus and I was miserable. None of my friends there worked and for them, living “poor” was hip. I was the only one desperate not to be broke (because mom and dad couldn’t bail me out). I stayed there for 2 years even though I did poorly academically because I didn’t even know I could transfer schools. I thought if I left, I was giving up on college altogether. In reality, it took me almost 10 years to finish college (finally, at a state school) and I lived in poverty in the meantime…I still can’t eat ramen noodles because I grew so ever-loving sick of having them all the time.

In her case, I would eat ramen noodles any day over canned tuna fish. Twenty-eight years later, the smell of it still makes me queasy.

So, thanks to all of you who read the piece, disagreed with some or all that I said, shared your stories, commiserated with me, and/or misinterpreted my article and why I wrote it. Much appreciated!

Tells In Telling The Tale

21 Saturday Jul 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture

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Art Imitating Life, Battlestar Galactica (2004 series), Bones, DS9, Firefly, Fringe, Imagination, Phalanges, Sarcoidosis, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: DS9, Stories, Tales, Telling, Tells, TV Shows, Writing


Adm. Adama hugging Starbuck scene (screen shot/cropped), Battlestar Galactica, 2009. (http://blazingangel.tumblr.com).

I guess that we as individuals each have tells in telling stories, including our life stories. Certainly all writers have a tell, a catch phrase or common set of words that use in telling a story or in setting a scene. All artists have a unique signature, a nuance within a particular style or genre that sets them apart from someone painting by numbers. Sometimes, at least for me, it takes heavy doses of a writer’s style or of someone’s art for me to see the unique tells in the telling.

Firefly series opening logo, July 21, 2012. (Adamwankenobi via Wikia.com).

That’s been so true for me in watching entire TV series through Netflix over the past two years, whether through DVD or online streaming. Since the spring of ’10, I’ve watched, in order and their entirety, Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: Voyager, House, Firefly, Heroes, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Six Feet Under, Oz, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Battlestar Galactica, Bones and Fringe, mostly through Netflix. Now, some of these shows I’d seen plenty of when they were regular series, especially DS9, Six Feet Under, House and Oz, while I viewed most of these series for the first time.

There’s something different about watching a TV series all at once than watching it once a week in twelve, twenty-four or twenty-six episode blocks year by year. Especially with unlimited streaming. Earlier this year, I watched all seventy-six episodes of Battlestar Galactica over a six-day span in April, including the first two seasons between Saturday morning and Sunday evening Easter weekend (see my post “Battlescar Galactica” from June ’12).

In watching so many episodes, you quickly sense the rapport being actors, the plot and its direction, and the tells about a particular episode or season of a show. In watching DS9, I learned that whenever Quark would mention Dax’s relationship with a Gallamite (a race with a transparent skull) or a Tholian ambassador, I’d learn something revealing about one of the main characters, especially Dax or Quark. Only, there may’ve been only one scene in 176 episodes in which there was a Gallamite character, and none for a Tholian ambassador.

With House, if the “sarcoidosis” diagnosis came up before the last segment of an episode, it was always wrong, but if it came up in the last segment, it would occasionally be correct. The writers obviously knew that sarcoidosis was such a general diagnosis that it could mean nothing in nearly all the show’s mystery illnesses, revealing the desperation and pressure the characters felt in finding the right diagnosis to save someone’s life.

Bones in the human hand (from authentic human skeleton), March 25, 2004. (Raul654 via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GNU Free Documentation License.

For other shows, it could be a word, a line, an appearance of a sign or character even. For the first five seasons of Bones, the tell for Brennan’s emotional state — or lack of one — was how she’d say “phalanges,” “distal phalanges,” or even “ungual phalanges.” Brennan wiggled her “phalanges” with delight for babies and kids, and examined microscopic details of dead peoples’ phalanges with scientific coldness otherwise. For the sci-fi western Firefly, lines like “the money was too good” and cursing in Mandarin Chinese illuminated the contrast between haves and have-nots of twenty-sixth century humans, between technological advances and moral devolution.

There’s also Fringe’s opening with changes in colors signifying alternate universes and timelines. Not to mention Breaking Bad’s opening scenes foreshadowing how a season would conclude, or the use of light-skinned or biracial actresses as either technically or ephemerally brilliant characters on Fringe, Warehouse 13 and Bones.

But my all-time favorite tell in any season these days is from Battlestar Galactica, when Adama asks,

“What do you hear, Starbuck?”

“Nothing but the rain, sir,” she says

“Then grab your gun and bring in the cat.”

No matter how the characters felt, how dire the situation, or how triumphant the moment, it was the line that showed how precious the connections we have and need to have with each other and with our humanity.

I think that the way I can — we can — watch movies, TV series, read books and articles, look at art, and listen to music through these tells can tell me a lot about a writer, a musician or an artist. But it also tells me a lot about me. Not just that I’m a little weird. I’m also a sucker for a good story, one that is a bit ironic, a tad asymmetrical, that is quirky and epic, unique and yet mundane. A story that mirrors my life is one that tells me about me, at least in part.

Sweet and Sour 16

27 Monday Dec 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Religion, Youth

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16th Birthday, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Birthday Celebrations, Birthdays, Carvel Ice Cream, Ice Cream Cake, Mount Vernon New York, Stories


Slice of cake nicer looking, but similar in style to cake I had 25 years ago, December 27, 2010. Source: http://www.cake-decorating-corner.com

Happy forty-first birthday to me! Competing with the savior of humanity on the last week of the year has never been easy. Most years, there’s been no contest between the observed celebration of Jesus’ birth and the date of my actual birth. But the second half of my growing up years were the worst in terms of how I saw my birthday. From ’78 to ’87, there were two Happy Birthdays for me: one in ’79, and one in ’85. The one that occurred twenty-five years ago, I’d rather forget.

My sixteenth birthday, the twenty-seventh of December, was the first time since I turned nine that anyone bothered to give me a cake. This was a spontaneous decision, as I sat around 616 all day with little to do but watch after my younger siblings. Mom and Maurice agreed to buy me a birthday cake. Since it was my abusive stepfather’s money, I didn’t want any cake. I especially didn’t want the Carvel ice cream cake he thought I should have. I mean, it was a cold last Friday in December day, and all he could come up with was ice cream cake?

Carvel Ice Cream Store, Edenwald, East 233rd Street & Paulding Avenue, Bronx, New York, December 27, 2010. jag9889 at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jag9889

The kicker was that I had to go get the cake. It was my birthday, but I had to leave 616, catch the 7 bus to Prospect, get off at Waldbaum’s and walk over to the empty Carvel store to buy a chocolate ice cream cake with a huge vanilla ice cream coating. I bought it and brought it home so we could celebrate me turning sixteen.

I wasn’t thankful for this assignment, and it showed. I had two bites before my older brother Darren and my younger siblings devoured the rock-hard dessert. I wished that Maurice would just go somewhere and die. Not a violent death or one that I had to be the cause of. Just a death that he deserved, like a massive coronary blockage due to a diet rich in saturated fats.

About a week ago, I told my seven-year-old son this story. Or at least, an exaggerated, funny and much less painful fictionalized version of it. I made my ex-stepfather into Jabba the Hutt, and my Carvel ice cream cake into a small square boulder that was painted white. At one point in the story, I told Noah that I hit my stepfather in the head with a piece of the cake, “knocking him out cold.” I made it so that my siblings ate the cake like Shaggy and Scooby ate Scooby Snacks after solving a case, with tongues circling their faces and licking off the excess to boot.

Noah just laughed and laughed throughout. I just hope that he finds something to laugh about when he finally hears the real story.

Crush #1 and Other Bedtime Stories

10 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Sports, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, A.B. Davis Middle School, Bedtime Stories, Characters, Class of 1987, Classmates, Holmes ES, Humanities, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Stories


Noah Sleeping, September 2009

For about the past year and a half, me and my wife have spent some of our time at the end of the day with our son Noah telling him bedtime stories. Actually, it’s been mostly me, since my wife doesn’t like making up stuff. At first, it was just about every night, with me telling Noah true stories about family, friends, former classmates and my school experiences.

I’d often put Noah in those stories, especially the ones I knew he’d laugh at. Like the science teacher who came in one day smelling like a skunk had sprayed him because a skunk actually did. Or the story about my second day of high school, where I had to fight a class hipster because he thought that I was a wimpy push-over.

With me injecting Noah into these stories — usually as the character Ben 10 turning into Big Chill or Humongousaur — I realized I had to embellish a bit, making some of my real-life encounters less like real-life. I told stories about my father where I changed almost all of the wording because the real stories involved more profanity and bigotry than a five or six-year-old should ever have to hear. I’d leave out parts of stories about how mean some of my classmates or teachers were just to make sure Noah was ready to go to sleep happy and without asking me a lot of questions about my past.

About six months ago, I started making up stories, about eighty-five percent fictional in nature. The names

Noah in Snowaggedon (on balcony), February 2010

and places remained the same, but the incidences and their improbable outcomes didn’t. I figured out that Noah mostly enjoyed a few choice characters: a fictionalized ’80s version of my father, a singing, wise-cracking fictional classmate, a super-smart classmate who’d get a case of the “ums” and “uhs” under duress, a friend from my elementary school days who’d fart when under pressure, and an even more tomboyish version of my Crush #1. Noah has since asked for those characters in my stories over and over again.

He’s also asked a lot of questions about my real-life classmates, teachers and family. Like, “Did you really have a classmate who sings ‘Roxanne’ all the time?” Or “Did [your friend] really fart all the time?” “Are you still friends with [super-smart boy]?” So I pulled out the MVHS Class of ’87 yearbook that I had borrowed from a former classmate when revising drafts of Boy @ The Window to show Noah pictures of them so that he could see that these weren’t the larger-than-life, made-up characters I used in my bedtime stories. Not to mention using the power of Facebook to bring home that fact as well.

This past week, Noah’s asked a few more questions. “Do you still like [Crush #1] a lot?,” Noah asked me a couple of days ago. “I still like her, but not the way I liked her when I was twelve,” I said in response, kind of shocked that he asked me that question out of the blue. I then thought for a moment, “Maybe I should keep the twelve-year-old in me to myself until he’s older.”

Noah Salutes

Then I realized. I have to tell Noah these stories. At the very least, it’ll help him not make the same mistakes I made growing up. That way, he won’t have to spend most of his time growing up without good friends, without an eleven-year gap between kisses, with mostly stories that would make most six-year-olds cry. Or, at the least, sad. He can read all about it when he’s older and Boy @ The Window’s published.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

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