Over the weekend I watched an episode of a new series streaming on HBO Max called “Hi, I’m...” that a friend I grew up with recommended. The premise of the show features ordinary people doing extraordinary things. One of the first episodes profiled a former high school teacher of ours, Nancy Rubin.
Nancy Rubin was a teacher for decades, spending most of her career at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA. Nancy taught a class called “Social Living,” which was a sophomore requirement. Social Living covered sex education, drug awareness, relationships, and anything that was too embarrassing to be brought up in a normal class. Nancy was open, caring, and non-judgmental. She was many students’ favorite teacher, and I liked her very much.
The extraordinary thing Nancy Rubin did for her students was to ask each of them to write a letter to their future selves. The letter could talk about what was going on in their present lives, their hopes and plans for the future, their musings and dreams; anything you wrote to yourself was acceptable, although Nancy recommended being kind. The student was asked to write two dates on the letter: the date it was written, and the future date you would like the letter to be received. This date could be in one year, five years, or decades. Nancy kept a vast filing system in her home, and endeavored to send each student their letter when the date arrived. She kept at this for at least three decades. Now long retired, she is reaching the end of the pile.
The episode was produced and directed by another of Nancy Rubin’s former students, filmmaker Jennifer Steinman Sternin. I’m assuming it was Jennifer who found and selected some of Nancy’s past students to interview. Some were filmed as they opened the letter they had written to themselves decades earlier, to emotional effect. Some were interviewed regarding what Nancy was like as a teacher. After a few minutes into the episode, I became suspicious regarding the narrative that was unfolding.
I knew some of the former students interviewed, people who had been my classmates back in the Eighties. They were the same people who had gained notice in high school. This attention was not unwarranted; they were all talented people. They were also people with whom, because of my life circumstances, I felt I had little in common.
One of the differences between Social Living and other classes was that it was a mix of all students. In the 1980s Berkeley High worked on a tracking system: some students were on the college prep track, the rest were receiving the typical undereducation of any institution in the underperforming California Public School system. This meant that, though Berkeley High’s enrollment had a large percentage of students of color, my classes as a college prep-tracked student were predominantly White, with a few Black and Asian kids from educated families thrown in. But everyone was in Social Living.
Why, then, were the same voices being amplified - the voices of well-liked Berkeley High students from educated families who went on to become objectively successful adults? Although there were a couple of students from a different socio-economic background being interviewed, their time on screen was recognizably limited. Why hadn’t the filmmaker cast her net a little wider? And what had happened to my letter?
When I moved away from Berkeley in 1984, it was with complete intention. Although Berkeley could be a haven for left-leaning people, its downfall has been its limitations as an intellectually homogenous place (I’m talking about the city, not the university). There is a reason that “Berkeley Liberal” is a slur. Any place that favors political correctness over the reality of how this country operates is openly displaying its missteps. I was sick of being surrounded by people who acted consciously obtuse regarding what the rest of the country/world was like.
One of the most annoying aspects of neo-liberal culture is its insistence on symbolism. If you take your kid to the protest march, if you post a placard in your window for all to see, if you sign that online petition, you’ve made a political impact. The bitter reality is that you haven’t, and no one cares. Empty symbolism is not the same thing as putting yourself out there and taking action, which is often risky and uncomfortable.
Let me provide an example of how this played out at Berkeley High in the Eighties. There was much canvassing by students who felt they were addressing the social ills of the day. People were always shoving a donation box in your face, aggressively calling for money to fight the famine in East Africa, to ban nuclear weapons, to kick the ass of Ronald Reagan. All noble causes, but distant. One day as I sat outside at lunch, an unpleasantly liberal student shook a coin box in my face and demanded I give money to fight apartheid. I made an excuse why I couldn’t give anything. “So you don’t care about apartheid?” they gloated, giving me a disgusted look. How could I tell this student that it wasn’t that I didn’t care about apartheid; in fact, I cared about it very much. It was that my mind was occupied with how I would get food that day, or where I would sleep that night. That I had zero cents to my name.
Nancy Rubin did take action, from the platform of her Social Living classroom. She created a safe space where many students could explore some of their true feelings and challenges for the first time. This was stated again and again in all the interviews featured in “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin,” almost verbatim. Were the interviewees coached? It all seemed placed to reinforce the through-line, that Nancy Rubin had assigned a letter that had changed everyone’s lives. Why, then, did I barely remember this assignment?
The problem is, there were other iterations to this story that the filmmaker had left out entirely. What about the students, like myself, who would never receive the letter to their future selves? Were we not worthy inclusions?
In 1982 I was a sophomore enrolled in Nancy Rubin’s Social Living class. These are some of the impressions I had of the class: a lot of laughing as Nancy gently nudged us to talk about embarrassing topics like sex and drugs; a lot of misinformation held by young, ignorant students being cleared up; and very little more. During this time, I was abandoned by my family. My struggle in those years was just to get to class and appear to be a normal teenager, though I felt anything but. I was not able to be honest in assignments asking about my home life, my family, my deepest feelings. I had to keep all that under wraps, as I was a child on my own, an inherently illegal and criminal person; an undesirable, because what kind of kid did you have to be for your own family to reject you? I understood there was what came to be known as “mandated reporting”: there were rules in place requiring teachers to report known cases of abuse or neglect to the authorities. I knew better than to disclose my real situation to Nancy Rubin, or any adult, for that matter. My primary objective was to avoid becoming a ward of the State of California.
As I watched “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin,” and saw shots of the original assignment on paper, I remembered that letter to my future self. And what I remember was that I did not know what address to put on the letter. I had no address of my own, and there was no one in my family who had a stable enough residence where it could have been sent. I also didn’t know if I would even be in touch with anyone in my family by the time the letter was sent – as a fifteen-year-old on my own, my future was completely uncertain. I didn’t even know if I had a future.
What about those students whose life situations were too precarious to complete the letter-writing circle? I couldn’t have been the only one. Why did Jennifer Steinman Sternin not consider these students, the ones who, because of the instability of poverty or abuse, could never have truly participated? As the teacher of Social Living, who had supposedly heard it all, what was Nancy Rubin’s plan for all the letters that had no chance of making it into the hands of their authors? If she had one, the audience was never informed.
Nancy Rubin had done an extraordinary thing with the letter assignment, affecting the lives of so many. But the piece on Nancy does everyone an injustice by only covering the warm and fuzzy. Nancy Rubin was a great teacher, one who thought of ways to open her students up and think for themselves, which is true education. Unfortunately, “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin” problematically displayed what is wrong with our current culture: it told the narrative it wanted to hear, not the story that actually happened.
I’m still wondering what my former self would have written me.