The Learning Wars

By Rose Higashi

Jack Silva is tired, cranky and underpaid. Odessa Jefferson is a bitter, proud perfectionist. These two teachers at a disadvantaged community college in the middle of booming Silicon Valley fight their own quirky wars against ignorance, illiteracy, cultural deprivation, poverty and pinheaded beaurocrats.

In this hilarious satire on the eternal battles between youth and age, men and women, art and technology, excellence and mediocrity, two unlikely heroes lead the reader on a journey of joy.

Light, lively, odd, yet strangely healing, this novel celebrates the human spirit's capacity for innovation and growth in the most unlikely circumstances. Reading this book will awaken a hunger for beauty you might almost have forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 19, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469799070

Rose Higashi

Rose Anna Higashi was born in Joplin, Missouri. She now lives in Los Gatos, California with her husband Wayne and teaches literature and poetry at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. She is the author of Blue Wings, a poetry journal.

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All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Rose Anna Higashi

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Published by Writer’s Showcase presented by Writer’s Digest an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

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Some of the places in this story are real; none of the people are…

ISBN: 0-595-09538-0

ISBN: 978-1-4697-9907-0 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Marshmallows

Canned Pears

Abbey Road

Lavender Rose

Dead Trees

Arugula

Veranda

Bad Coffee

Aida

Sardines

Science Diet

Snapple

Chocolate Truffle Cake

La Rinconada

Jane

Gelato

Blue Satin

Candles

Honey Baked Ham

Red Jell-O

Leftovers

Chicken Feet

Almond Gelatin

Enchiladas

Mustard

Good Coffee

Mineral Water

Hot Fudge Sundaes

Smoke

In memory of my father, Dr. Patrick Murdock,

a veteran of the learning wars

Marshmallows

Jack Silva and Odessa Jefferson were both making Jell-O. Of course, they were unaware of this shared interest—fixation really—because they lived on opposite sides of the valley and almost never spoke to each other.

Jack was making speed Jell-O with ice cubes in a twenty-year-old Tupperware bowl. As usual, he stood at the sink of his sparsely furnished beige apartment on Alum Rock Avenue in east San Jose, his home since Melody left him. The Tupperware, now growing a bit brittle, was among the stuff she left behind. Actually, she left everything, except the dog. Tonight Jack was making red Jell-O. He made red Jell-O whenever he had an especially trying day at South City College where he had worked for the past twenty-five years. He decided that he would also add miniature marshmallows. He only added the marshmallows when things were really traumatic. On neutral days, when none of

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The Learning Wars

his colleagues made him feel like a pathetic burned out sixties has-been, he made yellow, and on good days, when the students listened with rapt fascination to his lectures, such as his astute summary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s interpretation of Beowulf as a heroic-elegiac poem rather than an epic, he made green Jell-O. He had only made green once this semester.

Canned Pears

Odessa Jefferson always made green Jell-O. In her mind, there was only one color of Jell-O—green. She made a three-ounce package of green Jell-O every evening when she got home from her thankless job teaching English at South City College along with the likes of that contemptible moron Jack Silva. Green matched her cozy 1920s cottage in charming Willow Glen. She decorated it herself, primarily because on her paltry salary she couldn’t really even afford to live there, much less hire a decorator. But the thought of living on the South Side, after all the years she had spent with Jane Austen working on her doctorate. Really, didn’t she deserve some reward for all the sacrifices she had made? But did those idiots at South City appreciate the fact that she had written a really first-rate dissertation on Persuasion when she was at Emory? No. She had to teach five composition classes

along with all those losers in the English Department who went to San Jose State and didn’t know Neo-Classicism from Romanticism. And then once a year in the spring semester, that witch Louise would toss her a crumb and let her teach the second half of Survey of English Literature. Of course she always threatened to cancel it if Odessa couldn’t round up at least twenty students. There weren’t twenty students on the whole campus who could comprehend Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, much less the social subtleties of Jane Austen. She had spent the entire winter break re-reading Carlyle and Ruskin just to keep herself in tune with the Victorians, and that glorified secretary who calls herself a Dean canceled the class before the semester even started because there were only eighteen students in it. Really! Why didn’t the Dean go out and recruit a few students on her eighty thousand dollar salary? Odessa Jefferson was a scholar, not an army Sergeant.

Odessa was adding canned pears to the green Jell-O. If Jack Silva had been there to see that, he would have been horrified. You’re using canned pears when you can get beautiful fresh California pears in any grocery store! He would have launched into one of his passionate lectures—all about how this valley used to be filled with pear, prune and apricot orchards and the blossoms spread as far as the eye could see every spring. How he and Kenny Nishikawa used to drive up Mt. Hamilton Road after basketball practice at San

Jose High School and they could see pink, silver and white blossoms all the way from Milpitas, at the north end of Santa Clara county to Morgan Hill in the south. The air was clean in those good old days, and you could smell the hot tomato paste from the Contadina cannery all the way to Alum Rock Park, and the goddamned building contractors hadn’t ripped the heart out of every neighborhood yet and sewed every politician up into their pockets. Of course Jack wouldn’t have noticed Odessa’s eyes glazing over and that look of contempt on her face. No one could shut him up once he got rolling.

Odessa was putting canned pears into the Jell-O because she had made Maurice a pear and cottage cheese salad the first time he sneaked into her dorm room when she was a junior at Georgia Tech. She had one of those little refrigerators where she kept all of her favorite snacks—jars of peanut butter and grape jelly, Butterfinger candy bars, Eskimo Pies, and of course cottage cheese when she was pretending to be on a diet, which was most of the time. Back then the dorm rooms weren’t air conditioned, and she was the only student who had her own refrigerator. That in itself added hugely to her status. In fact, when Maurice sneaked into her room on that fateful hot night in May, his first words were, I hear you’ve got some cold Coca-Cola in that fridge.

Abbey Road

As he stirred the tiny marshmallows into the partially cooled red Jell-O, Jack Silva had temporarily stopped obsessing about the English Department meeting that had ended three hours earlier when Odessa Jefferson stomped out in a huff claiming that she wasn’t hired to teach English as a second language, and why can’t the students learn to speak English before they come to college? He was listening to Abbey Road on his 1963 vintage record player that he and Kenny Nishikawa had made from a Heathkit. Well, actually, Kenny had done 99 percent of the work, but Jack had read all of the directions very carefully, and he helped organize the parts for Kenny, arranging them in neat piles on the card table in his parents’ garage. And they had split the cost equally. It took a long time to save up $39.95 each from their summer jobs picking apricots at the Machados’ ranch. "I’ll bet that snooty Odessa Jefferson

never had to work a summer job when she was in school, he thought, just as Here Comes the Sun" came on to lift his sagging spirits.

Lavender Rose

As usual, Odessa used her special Waterford crystal bowl for the green Jell-O with the canned pears. It was a wedding shower gift from one of her sorority sisters at Emory back when she and Maurice were still in law school. She transferred to Emory because he was going there, although she was sure she could have gotten into Harvard or Yale. That night in May while she pulled the cottage cheese out of her refrigerator and opened a can of pears along with two bottles of Coke, he told her he had just been accepted at Emory. Even back then she had a full set of china—Royal Albert’s Lavender Rose—a bit fussy perhaps for a dorm room, but she thought she’d made quite an impression on Maurice when she got