A Particular Vocabulary Unto Yourselves

I’ve had this nagging itch to write but nothing to write about. Of course, as I noted here not too long ago, there’s not much evidence that anyone reads this blog, so it’s not like anyone’s beating down my door to get Maine Moose Patrol’s NEXT BIG THOUGHT posted.

At the correctional facility where I teach there’s a program called WorkReady(tm) (hereafter, WR) that I facilitate several times a year, instructing a handful of men for 11 weeks at a time on the soft skills of obtaining and maintaining employment when they leave inside for outside. After fits and gasps in December for a variety of reasons, the winter group began two weeks ago. We seemed to get into a rhythm the last two days, and I hope it lasts.

One of my WR students just completed a college course I facilitated that introduced entrepreneurship skills. When he gets out later this year, he’ll be taking over a family construction-related business. The college that sponsored the entrepreneurship class has signed on to provide more courses for men here, so this young man is pursuing a certificate in business with them, possibly transitioning to an associate degree or more, at some point.

By his own admission, he was “never an ‘in-school’ guy.” Like so many of the men in this place, great with hands-on, not so great with book learning. He was driven by intrinsic motivation to take hold of the work in the entrepreneurship class, but had started off WR with a pretty negative, lazy attitude, culminating in a warm discussion after class on Tuesday of this week, in which I invited him to choose whether he was going to participate or quit the class.

On Thursday, he was back in class, ready to learn once again. Then he began his other college classes and found that he needed help with writing. He immediately turned to me; “Mr. MacDonald, could you help me, please? I don’t want to be a bother–“

I cut him off. “It’s not a bother to help someone that wants to learn! I’m happy to help.” I’ve been helping him since WR ended this morning. He’s once again driven to do his work and to comprehend all he needs to know to learn for this course. It’s good to see.

As he writes an autobiographical piece of finding his place in society, he struggled a little to explain how working construction fulfilled that for him. I suggested some ideas to him, ending with, “You have a particular vocabulary all to yourselves, just like we teachers have one to ourselves. You speak a language that is yours. That’s part of what it means to “be a society.” What other ways can you think of to describe your social or work circle as “a society”?