Chapter 23
The Education degree demanded things Marcus had not fully anticipated: not just knowledge but the interrogation of knowledge, not just how to teach but why teaching was political, whose knowledge got taught and whose got omitted, who walked into classrooms feeling expected and who walked in already made to feel like a guest.
His first-year tutor was a Dr. Whitfield, a meticulous, bespectacled woman who assigned reading with the confidence of someone who believed books could change the world and had the evidence to prove it. She gave Marcus a B on his first essay, with comments that covered more of the page than the essay itself.
'Your observations are original,' she wrote, 'but your argument needs more structural rigour. You're writing from the gut. That's valuable. Now write from the gut AND from the frame. Both together.'
He rewrote the essay. She gave him an A minus and told him he was learning the right things.
He spent his first year building the frame. He read educational theory: Freire, hooks, Vygotsky, Dewey. He read sociology of education and the politics of curriculum. He sat in seminars and argued properly argued, the kind of argument that pushes thinking forward rather than staking territory about what school was for, who it served, what it did to children who arrived at its gates already marked by the world as lesser.
He wrote an essay in the second term about the experience of minority children in English classrooms. He drew on his own experience and on the research and on the literature he had read, weaving them together without apology. Dr. Whitfield gave it an A and asked his permission to keep a copy for her files.
'This is what the research needs more of,' she said. 'The interior view.'
He called his mother the evening after he got that mark. He read her the conclusion paragraph over the phone.
She listened in complete silence.
When he finished she said: 'Read it again.'
He read it again.
'Good,' she said. 'That's what I always knew was in there.'
He ran in the mornings, still, along the canal paths of Birmingham. The city was different from Wolverhampton larger, more layered, noisier but the canal paths were quiet and he needed quiet in the mornings to think, to sort through the previous day, to prepare for the next one.
He joined the university's athletics club. He ran cross-country and track. He won the university inter-hall cross-country in his first year, which surprised him slightly he had not run competitively at that level before but the coaches told him his natural endurance was exceptional and he should train more specifically.
He trained more specifically. He was not interested in running as a career or as a glory — he was interested in it as a discipline, a practice, a way of keeping his body honest with his mind.
He also wrote. He kept his journal. He began writing longer pieces essays, observations, short stories none of them for any audience yet, all of them for the practice of saying what he meant as precisely as he could.
At the end of first year, he had a first-class average and two friendships that would last the rest of his life: Tunde, and Priya, who had turned out to be reading Education too and who was, beneath the speed of her talking, one of the sharpest and most compassionate people he had ever met.