Daffnee

No one liked Ma-Ti from the Planeteers. He was short, had a funny haircut, and carried around a pink ring with which he would shout "Heart!" emphatically while his pet monkey sat on his head. The Planeteer website says that Heart was a "special new power, which symbolizes the compassion needed to save the Earth." Well, it was the early nineties, and Earth Day still seemed pretty cool then. Ma-Ti, however, was not.

I've come around to Ma-Ti and his little pink ring recently, though. Part of my warming-up to the kid and his money is due to Jan Wong's new series in the Globe & Mail -- you may remember Jan for Red China Blues, which she wrote after 10 years in Communist China turned her from a Montreal Maoist to a lover of Western capitalism. She's now an investigative journalist in Toronto, and went undercover for a month to see how a thirty-cent increase in the Ontario minimum wage really affected the working poor by taking a job at a maid service and renting out a basement apartment with her two sons.

Of the many things she reports on in the (long) installments, there were two parts that stuck out for me.

      By month's end, a pattern will emerge. The most slovenly homes belong to young professionals, especially, for some reason, lawyers. I suspect they were raised in families like this kid's, where someone else always did the housework.

The kid she speaks of is a boy who never learned to put up the toilet seat. Admittedly, this part only interested me because of the slovenly lawyer bit.

Secondly, Jan makes an interesting distinction between immigrants and the working poor when she makes clear who her co-workers are:

      I'm not talking about freelancers, the entrepreneurial cleaners from say, Portugal, the Philippines, Jamaica or Canada itself. They work alone, are paid cash and are treated, as so many of my friends tell me, “like part of the family.” They never call themselves maids. That group is dominated by immigrants. They are self-starters, sometimes well-educated, who came here seeking a better life. At maid services like Maid-It-Up, the cleaners are often white and Canadian-born, and have abbreviated educations and limited skills. “No immigrant would do this,” the daughter of Maid-It-Up's owner tells me. “They're too ambitious.”

In law school discourse, minority = of colour = disadvantaged = excluded = poor = etc. It's not true. In my opinion, the difference has much less to do with money, prejudice, language barriers, or education, and much more to do with values that we'd like to admit. It has much more to do with heart.

And who knows where heart comes from. What I do know is that this last year has been the most frustrating for me of the 5 years that I've been teaching -- not because I wasn't paid, or because I had to get up at 8 AM on a Saturday. The school was beautiful and the mother of my student was charming and intelligent. But the kids didn't want to be there. Their parents brought them to us because they couldn't figure out how to make them care -- about their schoolwork, their grades, or their future. I couldn't figure out how to make them care either, and that wast mostly because I had never encountered that kind of indifference.

All the kids I had tutored before wanted help. They weren't doing well; they knew they needed help; they wanted to do better. Some of them had learning disabilities, didn't have a strong academic background or whatnot, but they were a joy to teach because they were committed. I don't know how to teach a kid who not only doesn't want to do math on a Saturday but insists that she knows it all already even though she fails all her tests.

I'm at a loss, and I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how that side lives.