I went to the guidance office at school and dropped out. No one tried to dissuade me

The Star’s books editor, Deborah Dundas, explores the issues of inequality, the experiences of the working class and the poor, about who tells their stories and who doesn’t in the just-released book “On Class.”

The wisteria vines meandering around her central Toronto backyard are an interesting contrast to the large tobacco leaves Teresa Toten picked to earn money when she was 11 years old. We are sitting in her garden in mid-July — the showy, confident flowers are gone for the season, but the fecundity of the vines wrapped around an archway speak of the promise of next year. The Governor General’s Award-winning writer of young adult books, including “The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B” and “Eight Days,” sits comfortably with a beer, the faint hum of cars punctuates the background of our conversation.

It’s a far cry from the way Toten began life in this country: her parents fled Zagreb, Croatia, in 1955 when she was a day old; her mother came from a family of landowners who refused to embrace the communist regime, her father was a Canadian who was able to get them into this country and away from the dangers of a dictatorship.

When Toten was just seven months old, her father died, and her mother struggled financially after that. As a child, Toten was mostly left on her own and, as she describes it, she often “got into a great deal of trouble.” It was the kind of trouble that didn’t come from maliciousness but from not knowing how to take care of herself.

Child care was expensive, and Toten was often left to fend almost entirely for herself as her mother worked multiple jobs to support them. Once, Toten recalls, she’d emptied a can of cream of mushroom soup into a pot and put it on the burner — nobody had told her she had to add milk. “That burns really nicely,” she recalled. She and her mother had lived in a flat in a house at the time, and the landlady didn’t appreciate the smoke and burning smell. They were asked to leave.

In another flat, she pretended to be Tarzan in the kitchen, swinging from cupboard to cupboard on an imaginary vine. The cupboards all came down.

She got her social insurance number when she was 11 so she could work in the tobacco fields, manual labour which paid well compared to other jobs and even offered upward mobility for some farm workers.

“Tobacco was good money … for good reason,” Toten said. “(The work) was dirty and hard.” While the idea of what makes for “good money” is relative, Ontario had only recently, in the mid-1960s, implemented a mandatory minimum wage — with men to earn at least a dollar an hour and women 85 cents, although this didn’t apply to agricultural workers. By comparison, during the tobacco harvest in 1959, a few years before the province-wide minimum wage was implemented, daily wages for adult men working in those fields was $13 a day, a substantial premium over even the minimum wage five years later.

In Toten’s leafy backyard that warm summer’s evening, a plate of cheese and a glass of wine and a beer on the table in front of us as we chat, we’re not far from the high school where her vice-principal recognized her academic ability and sat her down and helped her fill out university and scholarship applications, including to Columbia University and Trinity College at the University of Toronto.

She had no idea how to do that, she says, and considers herself lucky to have had teachers who encouraged her, guided her — showed her what was possible, believed she was capable of doing it, and helped her find a way. Role models and mentors are important: parents might want the best for you, but they don’t always know how to get there themselves, much less show their children the way.

She went on to U of T’s Trinity College because her teachers pushed her toward it; she won a bursary and studied political economy. Those few affirmative statements are the shorthand of a life: what one doesn’t see is the struggle and uncertainty. When she got to university, she says, she saw her schedule, saw that she had two classes on Monday, and a few on other days, and thought she had all this time.

“I started working full-time at the Sheraton Hotel, which had just opened up,” she says. “I had no idea how to study, I never had to study in high school.” She was getting Cs, was close to losing the bursary, and the administration let her know they were disappointed in her. “I was terrified, it was humiliating, I wanted to quit,” she said. “Mama put her foot down: ‘We’re not quitters! You don’t need the job. Quit the job.’”

It was a very difficult thing for someone who had always needed to work so that she could contribute to her family to do. But she cut her hours at the hotel and learned how to study. She found it hard to make friends — not because the well-off students didn’t want to be friends, she says, but because she felt uncomfortable. “They all had two or three houses and vacations in Europe and camp. There was nothing I could relate to.”

Almost failing, not measuring up in social terms. “The shame dogged me.” These uncertainties seemed to prove that she didn’t belong there. She went through a period of thinking, “Who did I think I was?”

Now, as an alumnus who eventually graduated, Toten gives lectures to students at Trinity College, and she tells them this: “If you don’t even know there’s a door there, how can you go through it? (If you’re) of a certain class … you don’t know where the door is. You don’t even know there is a door. You really are dependent on well-meaning teachers, maybe neighbours, a coach … who sees there can be more.”

That’s if you’re lucky. Not everyone has teachers who care.

There are assumptions made around students based on socio-economic circumstances and based on race about which, Toten notes, we’re much more aware than we ever used to be.

“Every BIPOC kid who is assumed to be not worthy of full attention; every East Asian kid assumed to be going to university … There’s an immediate presumption by teachers and everyone around you. ‘This kid doesn’t have a chance.’ Or ‘This kid’s going places.’ They could be getting the same marks, parents working hard, six days a week, all of that. And one kid will be hustled along, and the other kid will be ignored and assumed to be a troublemaker.”

Any time a person is chosen over another for reasons that aren’t obvious is an example of privilege at work. How can you hope to follow unspoken rules? What does that teach a child about the idea of merit? How does one person get the extra boost where another doesn’t? Why should one child’s future be so precarious, while another gets a leg up in a different direction?

If our society were a meritocracy, the rules for progressing would be set out, or at least easy to discern. It makes those of us who grew up unaware of the rules second-guess ourselves, even as adults; it makes those of us who were privileged enough to fit into the system’s norms assume we are there because we deserved to be.

Toten’s story speaks to her own grit and resilience; it also speaks to the lengths to which her mother went to provide for her child and make a better life for them both. Work hard, do whatever you need to succeed. These are the kinds of qualities politicians and social agencies often encourage when issues of class are raised, as if they believe that the only thing separating those making minimum wage from their middle-class “betters” is a lack of hard work and grit.

If someone asked me when I was growing up what I wanted to be, I wouldn’t have put secretary on the list. I saw myself as more of a career person, like the ones in books I read, but at 14, when I was choosing my high school courses for Grade 10, I was keenly aware of one thing: I needed to make sure that I had the skills to get a good job. My parents split up when I was eight years old, dividing us into two single-parent households. I lived full-time with my mother; my father had visitation rights. When I was between the ages of eight and 14 my mother moved with my brother and me seven times — my high school would be the 11th school I’d attended — and money was always tight. There were no extra funds for karate lessons or summer camp; I babysat my younger brother in the summer once I turned 12 to save on child-care costs.

All of the issues I faced — housing instability, lack of access to education or extracurricular activities, expensive child care — are still with us. My experience from the 1970s and 1980s is being repeated today — headlines still regularly highlight the lack of affordable housing, the waiting lists for kids’ activities, the high cost of education, expensive child care. We haven’t come that far.

I knew that, once I graduated from high school, I would need to take care of myself. So, I chose courses that would make me immediately employable: typing, shorthand, dictaphone/transcription. Secretarial skills. Skills that, ironically, would later stand me in good stead as a journalist. But this level-headed practicality had consequences that I couldn’t have foreseen when I made the decision.

At the time, there were two levels of high school diploma you could achieve in Ontario: with the first you graduated Grade 12, after which you could get a job or go to community college, but university was closed off to you. The second option required a fifth year of high school, for which you earned an “honours” graduation diploma, which was necessary to go on to university. Only those who took courses in the academic stream could go on to Grade 13. As this was considered “extra,” students who chose to do so had to buy their own textbooks.

And so, for the courses beyond the secretarial, I chose courses in the academic stream, so that the doors to a university education might someday be open to me.

But by the second semester of Grade 13, I couldn’t afford to buy those books. My parents were always complaining about money. I was 18 years old, had a high school diploma, and figured maybe it was time to go out and earn a living, to help out — a classic working-class stance.

I started looking in the want ads for a full-time job and quickly landed one at an import-export association. It paid minimum wage but came with a prestigious title: secretary to the vice-president.

I went to the guidance office at school and dropped out. No one tried to dissuade me. No one talked to me about my future. No one asked me about my aspirations. I am still surprised no one offered any kind of support. Maybe my choices, fuelled as they were by poverty and insecurity, had already locked in my future: by choosing skills-based courses that would make me employable, I had created a perception that that was all I aspired to. Maybe my teachers just assumed that my having a job, any job, was good enough.

I was fired within three months after botching a complex courier mailing. “Oh don’t worry,” said the chipper Kelly Girl recruitment lady at the employment agency. “I got fired from my first job too. We’ll find you another.” I soon began working as a temp at a sales office for business paper products, filling in for the full-time admin assistant. “Another day, another $1.50,” she said on payday. “I got a raise,” she explained. She looked at her credit card bill. “That’s all you get this month.” On the one hand, I admired her: an independent, working woman able to buy her own stuff, credit card bills notwithstanding. On the other hand, I thought: “Is that all there is?”

I was lucky: I had glimpsed a future I didn’t want. More importantly, I now had the money for those textbooks. I quit the job and went back to high school to finish Grade 13, having missed a semester. I gained the nickname “dropout” — which, though said laughingly, still hurt.

I hadn’t told anyone why I’d left school — the shame of not having enough money kept me quiet.

Excerpted from “On Class” by Deborah Dundas. Copyright © Deborah Dundas, 2023. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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