A Texas Education

This is a book about personal experience, but it is not a memoir. While experiencing threatening situations and circumstances that define one’s life, the author invites encounters with others to teach him important life’s lessons, while in fact he has been a college teacher for over thirty years. Learning—and unlearning—can come from anyone at any time. What is critical is remaining open to the encounters with others and seeing the joy in the act of experiencing. Life and learning are performance arts and the teacher often can only learn the art of teaching if she or he is constantly learning through the life-worlds of others. The stories in this book are all of real encounters, ranging from backstage encounters in universities that reveal the social world of academe, to lessons learned from anxiety-ridden sororities girls, to a transforming encounter with a Black man who grew from a child working at jobs such as a chicken-catcher at nights to support his family and became successful and wealthy, to the point that he was able to buy the movie theater that forced him to sit in the balcony when he was young. Virtually all of these stories emerge from a chance encounter with a strangely familiar culture—Texas.