SumBlog 6

I really enjoyed the video we watched in class on Wednesday; it made me appreciate custodians even more. It also reminded me of the janitor we had in elementary school. We called him Mr. Tom and he was so well-loved throughout the school. Teachers and especially students could never get enough of him. Unfortunately, Mr. Tom passed away in early 2011. During this time, I was in a creative writing class at my high school. I decided to write an elegy to him for one of my assignments. To this day, it is still one of my favorite creative works of mine—although it could use a little bit of editing. The impact that Mr. Tom had on me, and hundreds of other Clovis Grove students, is remarkable. He may not have been our teacher, but he taught us many things.

If Mr. Tom is just one custodian the world has had, I can’t imagine how many other great custodians are out there that have gone under-appreciated. This remembrance makes me want to have longer conversations with the custodians we have on campus. Where did they come from? What are their stories? Maybe one of them will impact my life as much as Mr. Tom did.

The issue of false consciousness is almost always relative to custodians. Most people think a custodian has that job because they can’t get anything else. A lot of times, however, the person chose to have that job—for many possible reasons. Because the world sees custodians in a less fortunate way, the custodians sometimes start to think of their self that way too. This leads to a false consciousness within these individuals. While Mr. Tom is not an example of a false consciousness, many custodians are—including ones from the film we watched.

I posted my elegy on this blog; here’s the link to it:
http://mollyhendries.blogspot.com/2014/03/if-it-were-up-to-us-elegy-to-mr-tom.html