On Saturdays, with her grandmother mostly out of the room, I tutor Guadalupe Figueroa, aged 14, at the family's kitchen table. There is a picture of the Last Supper hanging above us, with colorful figures of Jesus and the Twelve, going in all directions. Today there is a stock pot simmering on the stove across from where we sit. The turquoise walls sweat from the steam of whatever's cooking.
The way I most enjoy making money in this time I'm without a classroom job, is tutoring. The school district—improbably, wisely—pays for home after-school tutoring for disadvantaged kids at risk of flunking basic algebra. Lupe has already flunked it once and is taking it again.
I'm college-educated, white, middle-class. At any rate, I was raised middle class. Earlier generations of my family bootstrapped themselves into the middle class with public-sector employment, which I'd assumed would always be there for me. Sorry, guess again: I took on debt to train to teach in public schools, training I completed in 2010, and which now seems to be worthless. The game is different. We're all having to come up to speed on new rules.
Today Lupe is learning to solve quadratic equations. It's not easy. I watch as she sighs and shifts in her chair. There are a couple of little boys running around, shrieking deafeningly in the next room. I bang my pencil down and smack my lips and get up.
"Would you guys cool it in there, or else take it outside?" I ask incredulously, "Please?"
"Have you studied the quadratic formula in class yet this term?" I ask Lupe.
Lupe shakes her head.
"Then we're going to solve this equation by factoring. We'll be breaking it into the two smallest pieces we can break it into, and this may take a few tries. Those pieces, when we find out what they are, will show us where the 'zeros' of this equation are, where the equation's curve would cross the 'x' axis, if we were to graph it. We can multiply the pieces we made by factoring, to give us the equation we started with. Then we know we factored it right. Factoring uses 'trial and error,' O.K.?"
Lupe nods. She has wide-set dark eyes.
I remind myself that practice problems in math textbooks are carefully graded for difficulty. Of course this one is factorable; they all are.
Lupe checks her latest try with multiplication. It fails.
"FUCK this shit," she exclaims. She flings her pencil, pushes away, and storms out, her hair swishing. Lupe is near fully grown, close to my height.
I know she'll be back.
She comes in after a minute and sits down again. I look at her with a mock-stern expression.
"I have never heard those words before," I said. "I am so embarrassed, I will have to tell your grandmother."
"She don't speak English," says Lupe, smiling teasingly.
Lupe is at it again, trying one possible solution, then another. I praise her for writing each trial down, neatly, as frustrated as she is. Maybe it really is this hard.
Lupe's is an immigrant family. Her parents work several low-wage jobs each, in distant cities. Lupe is as familiar with pride as anyone who lives in our rich country, and she knows all about struggle, too. The old promise, if it's even made anymore, about starting from zero and someday "winning" because you work very hard, for a very long time, without reward, is a lie: Lupe knows you don't "win" through struggle. At best, with the pride you take in your survival, struggle brings you up to zero. Rich athletes on TV bypass struggle into glory. Kids like Lupe sit in over-crowded math classes, where beleaguered teachers give them problems they should be able to solve quickly. To have to struggle at a problem, in their experience, is to know it's already futile, something is already very wrong. Regarding the prospect of not being able to solve a math problem effortlessly, they smell a rat. Why shouldn't they?
The pot boils over. I am sitting closest to the stove, and I dart over to turn off the burner. The room feels close. There are fragrant, dirty oranges in a bowl between us. Lupe works, I watch, trying not to hover.
She is confident, methodical, and relentless.
"I finish," says Lupe after a few minutes. "Done." She shows her work to me. I multiply, to check her answer. She's nailed it. There are nine failed tries above her correct solution, with a neat line through each. I pencil a check mark by her latest effort, and a dumb little smiley face. I beam at her.
"Good. Good for you. You worked very hard on that one, for a long time," I said. Lupe beams back.
Lupe's grandmother, in an old sweatshirt, a limp skirt, and pink bedroom slippers, has come in and is chopping vegetables with a big, stained knife. She overhears all this.
"Trabajaste muy fuerte," she says, and comes over and places her hands on Lupe's shoulders and kisses her cheek.
It was cloudy before, now it's gotten dark and the darkness hugs the windows. The children still playing outside make light, bubbly noises.
For their pride, it's no wonder so many equate struggle--perseverance without success, falling down, getting back up again, countless times--only with drudgery. But struggle can precede breakthrough.
Breakthrough builds self-assurance, a sense of one's own power. Breakthrough, for this reason, is incendiary. I'm thinking this as I drive home in the night. The stars have come out; the brighter ones are visible through the city's glare. Struggle. Breakthrough. Struggle. Breakthrough. Conditions have to be just right for this cycle to occur. It's a kind of radicalism, the basis for many kinds of advancement. It's a sequence our culture thwarts under most circumstances and in most people.
Lupe will do fine this year in algebra, even though my allotted sessions with her have almost run out. She'll pass this course, which is required these days for graduation. I hope she'll continue with math after that, helping others along.