Word Gets Around
Interesting thing about RC on the Internet: I recently got a call from a working-class/poor woman who grew up in Lewiston, Maine, USA. She is a graduate student, and after five years of struggle in higher education she was finally beginning to be able to think about the impact of the class issues on her life in academia. She decided to make this the focus of some of her schoolwork. She did a search on the Internet and got 850 items in her search. She called me to say that of all of them, mine was the only one that was useful.
We have since struck up a nice friendship. The article she found useful-I didn't even know it was on the Internet-was the one in a recent Present Time on a useful format for addressing class in any group of people. I sent her all the RC information I could gather and listened to her as she planned a seminar for raised-poor and working-class people at her campus. The seminar was very well received, though she was a bit surprised at the response. "People were very emotional," she said. She was a little disappointed at not having gotten through her agenda. "People just wanted to talk about their experience!"
Dan Nickerson
Freeport, Maine,
USA