Posted on 09/08/2017 3:52:10 PM PDT by rey
Leslie Mancillas believes everyone has a story worth telling. The Santa Rosa Junior College professor and author has worked with her students over the past few years capturing their stories of hardship, hope and triumph in anthologies.
Gearing up for her latest student compilation, Mancillas finds herself reflecting about surviving childhood abuse in a memoir she hopes to finish next summer.
Her mother beat her and two siblings while hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, Mancillas said, which had been prescribed for weight loss and sleep. The amphetamines gave her mother — a petite hospital nurse — super strength, she said.
“When she was on this stuff it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said Mancillas, who previously co-authored with Press Democrat wine writer Peg Melnik a book on how to keep romance alive while married with children.
The regular physical and verbal abuse persisted for almost a decade until her then-divorced mom discovered Nichiren Buddhism and got off the prescription pills. Mancillas said her late mother chronicled the abuse in diaries as part of therapy.
“My mother gave me this gift from the beyond. Her journals not only corroborate what I’m writing, they also show she loved us,” said Mancillas, who this summer returned to the 13-story apartment building where she grew up on West End Avenue in Manhattan.
“She felt so much pain and guilt about our childhood. She really never forgive herself. It haunted her.”
It’s a story she likes to share with students in her college skills classes that are aimed at preparing them for college-level courses, to encourage and teach them about the power of hope and resilience.
“All of a sudden they look at me as a real person,” said Mancillas.
And her students opened up about the dreams and obstacles they face.
(Excerpt) Read more at pressdemocrat.com ...
The article is rather vague as to what Mancillas teaches, but looking at the SRJC catalog, it appears she is a "college skills" educator, not a writing teacher,like this article implies (I have many reservations about people entering college who are not prepared for college). She also seems to be a favorite with this paper, as there are several articles about her.
I don't think the "write about your feelings, paper is a valid college subject, with maybe the exception of a creative writing class. Sadly, few will care about your feelings after leaving college. An employer will never ask to write about your personal experiences, and employment is THE number one reason people seek education (which I also think is not the true purpose of education). Employers want people who can write accurately and critically, not whine about their parenting.
I had a student write an unsolicited paper about her husband, a law enforcement officer, being shot to death in front of her. I felt like a complete schmuck putting a mark on such a paper and refused to grade it. An instructor runs into a very troublesome area when grading feeling and personal experience papers. Most students are not mature enough to remove themselves from the technical aspects of writing to understand that comments and grades are of a technical value and perhaps a criticism on the effectiveness of the paper, not a criticism on the validity of such an experience or feeling. This is why I never assign such papers and when they do appear, I decline to grade them. I will help a student improve such a paper, but such endeavors do not count toward a grade.
This instructor is another touchy feelie sort of instructor.
SRJC is a huge place, they get everything from people who could easily do their freshman and sophomore years anywhere in the world but are getting the units on the cheap on one hand (and there are some excellent STEM courses) through to people who should not have been allowed to graduate HS.
I took the vocational welding course there as dad suggested to get a trade as well as going on to a BA.
One of the things they do well is getting folks up to speed for college who should have never been allowed out of HS. Don’t blame JC for filling the gap, it’s the fault of a few high schools around here that just push ‘em out when they have enough seat time.
The instructors run the gamut from STEM, English and Econ hardasses (my econ teacher proudly said he gives one or two ‘A’s a semester, if that, and only as deserved- in a class of 200+) who could teach anywhere but want to live in this area through ‘touchy-feelie idiots who do more harm than good. The real strength of the place is a lot of good vocational night classes for those of us who needed to work right out of HS but wanted to learn a trade or get the units to start as a junior at a college where the costs were many many times higher.
“This instructor is another touchy feelie sort of instructor.”
My parents were into meth and I’m just not going to repeat what my life was like because of this. If her damage is expressed as just being ‘touchy feelie’ then I’m happy for her.
Absent some bad choices that turned out well for me I’d be happy to be a bit touchy feelie myself.
I would agree that this is a pretty good JC and that the JC is probably the place to get up to speed but writing about your adversity is not a subject for the classroom. Big time trouble there and that is not a topic that will get you far in your education. They have counselors on campus for that. Expository writing is where you start gradually pulling them into more critical assessments.
That is a good welding course. I have tried repeatedly to get into the diesel technology class. It is seldom offered and fills in a heart beat.
I’m very happy for you but as I noted, the classroom is a dangerous place for that sort of thing especially with an instructor not trained to deal with things that may happen when encountering such issues, especially in an open classroom. I am more than qualified to instruct you on technical and critical writing. I am not qualified to aid you in dealing with a troublesome childhood. The classroom is not the place for this. I certainly will lend an ear and aid you in finding assistance but can do no more than encourage and can be doing far more damage encouraging you to potentially open up a can of worms that I am unable to competently address.
Ah, I see.
You’re right. Some of these kids should never have been let out of high school.
I went to the school website to see what kind of academic background this person has. I didn’t find a list of professors but did look at the college skills section.
Here is one of the courses they teach:
General Arithmetic: CSKLS 371 (3.5 units) offers basic math instruction needed to build a strong foundation: addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, working with fractions, decimals, percents and measurement.
A college teaches this?
Yep. It is bad. If they want to deal with feelings, perhaps they should deal with feelings of worthlessness and how to improve your lot in life by engaging in a little stoicism and buckling down and working hard. I am only half joking here. Sadly, wallowing in stories of self pity won’t really get them anywhere.
As a university ESL instructor, I would give in-class writing assignments on the first day as an assessment tool to make sure the students were placed in the correct level. There were no problems until I moved to a community college with lots of Africans. For intermediate level assessment of the various past verb tenses, I asked them to tell me about the last day in their home country. I had had no problems with this at my previous university and college jobs, but it quickly became clear that this was a mistake. In addition to the usual stories of grandparents seeing them off at the airport or farewell parties, I got several that involved fleeing into the bush to escape machete-wielding rebels, violent armed-robberies while the police looked on, and swimming to make it on to the last ferry. Needless to say, the topic was changed for the next semester’s entry assessment writing.
Sounds like the “Developmental Math 01” course my 17-year-old just finished at Central Piedmont. “Yippee, you got an A in 8th-grade math!” But hey, we’re paying cash for one semester of catch-up math (her fault, not mine!!!), and she’s also getting As in college English and German I.
As least someone does :-(
I bet!
I had a friend from Eritrea whom I had the privilege and honor of helping study for his citizenship. The stories he and his son told me, very matter of factly with what seemed to be little exaggeration (he was much more the kind of guy given to understatement), were truly chilling. Probably one of the things that made me appreciate my citizenship the most. His English was always a weird kind of ‘sing song’, and sometimes funny (I got he Lederer’s ‘English is a funny language’, or why we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway)... but it was his FIFTH language, and he helped me get some Amehric under my tongue :-)
My brother-in-law was a very successful mathematics professor and at one point he taught at the high school level. He told me that his first few weeks with an entry-level class was spent covering not only the assignment curriculum but also the history of mathematics, and would venture into great detail about functions and symbology, and where they came into play, and what exactly they meant. He stated that many teachers would just start on page 1 and cruise through the book leaving quite a number of students in the prop wash foundering, and never recovering from a snowballing effect the rest of their time in school mathematics. But, by going into good detail regarding the history of how mathematics developed engaged the students at a different level and they came out not only understanding the functionality of mathematical equations but also the history behind it, which gave those functions depth.
I have always admired his ability to reach the students who would have, or could have failed in grasping onto the essentials.
The only real African I knew in college told hair raising stories too. His favorite story (to tell the girls) was how he and other guys in his tribe were circumcised at the age of 18 without anesthetic and how they all went down to the river afterwards to wash off. Needless to say, the girls avoided him like the plague. No more stories!
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