Professor Kerry Sinanan encouraged me to take part in a number of conference panels sponsored by the ECS (at MLA and NASSR). Working with other scholars in the field of Romanticism and the Caribbean has inspired me to start investigating early tourism in the region, particularly around the time in which modern guidebooks evolved – the early 19th century.
This has proven to be a fruitful path of research for me, and I am eager to share more of my work over time – including in a forthcoming issue of The Keats-Shelley Journal.
I’m building my online courses for the fall. The fall of 2020. The one wherein we’re still in the midst of the pandemic. I have all these aspirations for my online pedagogy: open pedagogy, OER pedagogy, pedagogy that empowers students to learn how to make online content, pedagogy that inspires students to become readers and writers. And then there’s the fact of the pandemic. I can barely read anything longer than a tweet. I can barely concentrate on anything for more than three minutes. I have a baby. Nearly my entire family just recovered from COVID19. Two of my friends’ parents just died on ventilators.
This is all to say: I can barely put together a regular-degular-schmegular Blackboard site for my students. How am I going to expect students to be more functional than I am? Can I design a course that helps students meet the learning objectives of the courses while accommodating the stress of living in the midst of a pandemic?
I have spent a couple years operating under a philosophy that quantity could lead to quality: get students to read and write a lot, then they’d get better at both. I still believe this, but unfortunately, these activities take time. I read this tweet by Marcos Gonsalez last night:
“more reading/more work is better learning” assumes a universal student, one that has enough time & resources in which to dedicate to the work, & one with a body/mind that can process all that material in short spans of time. More work doesn’t mean better quality of learning.
He emphasizes “method” over “content”. Earlier in the thread, he advocates teaching “fewer texts, carefully selected, paying closer attention to what those texts are doing is more generative for students’ learning & time.” Being more deliberate about the method involves “care,” as he states here. That care takes almost more time than just assigning an entire chapter or article or book does. It means that the instructor has to find the specific bit that generates appropriate student experience.
In mulling over this problem of quality over quantity for the coming semester, culling many of the texts and deliberating deployment, I feel sad. In part because I’m asking myself “Did I make students do a lot of unnecessary work all these years?” (yes). Also because I’m realizing how many of my pedagogical decisions are guided by my ego rather than my consideration of student needs. When I’m planning my courses, I’m always considering what other instructors would think when they look at my materials rather than what students are going to think when they look at them.
Being self-conscious of one’s syllabi and teaching decisions is baked into the cake: we have to submit the syllabi to administrators. They’re evaluated by committees when we’re being promoted. We have to design them for bureaucracy rather than students’ eyes. For instance, how many students spend a great deal of time poring over our learning objectives or boiler-plate course descriptions anyway? I know that I never did much of that – I’d scramble through looking for the number of essays required and the books being taught. I’m also in a position where I collect and glance over faculty syllabi for a particular course every semester to make sure components are not missing and that grading requirements are being followed. The very things students don’t look at are the things I have to assess when I do this.
The issue of “two syllabi”—one for students, one for administration—irks me before the beginning of each semester. This brings me back to the issue I began with: the issue of designing a course on Blackboard versus building one that I would be really proud of. I’m going to fall back on the former this fall because we are still in “emergency mode”. A colleague of mine made a compelling case for this, saying that students already have to learn to use Blackboard for all their courses, and that it’s unfair to force them to learn whole other platforms in addition in times like these. I will reduce reading expectations and make the site as accessible as possible, but maybe along the way I will build a foundation for a more innovative course for the future.
In a state of helplessness, I wrote a guest post for John Warner’s blog on Inside Higher Ed. As I’m on parental leave for most of this semester, I have been watching my college “go online” with its instruction from afar, so I thought if I put together some of my thoughts on teaching online, I could be of help.
I wrote the post thinking of all the instructors at my college who were posting back and forth on the faculty listserv about their anxieties about using technology. And then there are some emails from folks over in EdTech with links to trainings and tutorials. I’m thinking, “This is all well and good, but how are the servers going to handle all this?” And also, I’m pretty competent with technology, and even I had a lot of technical kinks to work out in the process of deploying my online classes last semester. There’s absolutely no reason to tax everyone further with these ridiculous expectations.
This article by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, which I read right after I wrote mine, gets to the heart of the politics of this suddenly online education crisis:
Ask yourself: Do I really care about this? (Probably not, or else you would have explored it earlier.) Or am I trying to prove that I’m a team player? (You are, and don’t let your university exploit that.) Or I am trying to soothe myself in the face of a pandemic by doing something that makes life feel normal? (If you are, stop and instead put your energy to better use, like by protesting in favor of eviction freezes or packing up sacks of groceries for kids who won’t get meals because public schools are closing.)
I wish I knew how to put my energy to “better use,” but until I figure out what that looks like, I’m hoping that a few people who read my article will ease up a bit on themselves and their students.
I’m on day 50 or so of parenthood – I’m on family leave from work. I had a rough delivery and hard recovery with postpartum complications. Now I’m feeling better physically and able to handle some intellectual tasks when the baby is sleeping or chirping to herself in the bassinet.
In an attempt to brush off my scholarly chops, I perused the intros to a few Oxbridge travel-writing anthologies. I recognized much I’ve absorbed over the past decade reading on this topic, but I also re-realized vast swaths of ignorance. Of texts, authors, historical facts, and so forth. It’s downright humiliating, though it’s fortunately a humiliation I can suffer in the privacy of my own maternal convalescence.
Of course, as is my nature, I began curating a list of sources—primary and secondary—that I’d need to read to help reckon with the gaps in my knowledge, but I also began to parse what about travel writing per se is different from the area I’ve actually been studying and writing about, which is tourism. And perhaps in parsing this, I began to forgive myself for not actually knowing All The Things. I don’t actually study travel-writing when it comes down to it. I’ve always sort of known this, but this is the first time I’ve really articulated what this means. It’s not that I’m not interested in what people write about while they’ve toured around, it’s that I’m more interested in what they have written about touringaround – the boat ride, the way of transporting luggage, fellow tourists, how the trip affects how they feel about home, and especially what they think about tourism. It’s a difference between focusing on the subject of the trip rather than the object. “Travel writing” usually featurees both types of observations – those which are about the trip and those which are about the mechanics of travel or maybe rather meta-reflections on tourism.
In perusing these anthologies, I have come to the conclusion that I’d really benefit from studying medieval pilgrimages and the Crusades. And I need to learn more about the tourists that put graffiti on the Pyramids in Egypt in 1500 BCE – my archaeologist friend from graduate school says to consult The Graffiti of Pharaonic Egypt by Alexander Peden for information. Again – so many directions to go in here. Sometimes I fantasize about what I would write if I had more time to write: a book on medieval tourism and its relationship to (future) empire. Also, something about the ironic relationship between the purported religious purposes of the Crusades and the fact that the journey itself was rumored to be one of dissipation and, well, sex. This is supposedly why priests etc. would warn against the lure of the curiositas.
I’ve much to add to my “Uncomprehensive Travel-Writing Database” after this brief trip through the anthologies. As ever, academic scholarship proves humbling and intimidating. I do feel recharged and somewhat validated though to discover that for whatever reason, I remain compelled by the topic I landed upon in my senior year of college.
Books to peruse or re-peruse:
Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims, 1977
Zacher’s Curiosity and Pilgrimage, 1976
Batten’s Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature, 1978
Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 1997
Munter and Grose, eds., Englishmen Abroad, 1986
Korte’s English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, 2000
Stafford’s Voyage into Substance, 1984
Leask’s Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 2002
Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, 1989
Pratt’s Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992
Holland and Huggan’s Tourists with Typewriters, 2000
One extraordinary thing I’ve come to appreciate in the past two years at Hostos is the fact that its history is fascinating and even inspiring. As I learn more and more about the institution—why it was founded, whom it serves—I feel quite privileged to be a member of its faculty and in a position to promote its mission. I have been affiliated in the past with institutions built upon shameful legacies, so to serve an academic community with the potential to dismantle oppression motivates a lot of the pedagogical work I do.
I’ve been collecting materials about the college to use in my developmental and first-year writing courses, largely because I’m interested in learning more, but also because the issues raised by those who established this campus remain pertinent today (educational apartheid, poverty endemic to the South Bronx). And, for that matter, students love learning this bit of history. So many arrive at Hostos largely because of proximity and affordability, so when they learn that they just so happen to be at a school whose mission relates directly to their own educational goals, and when they identify with the reasons for which people founded the school in the first place, this knowledge ignites a spark.
Below, I’m compiling a list of articles and resources for future reference, and because I think everyone can benefit from learning more about this particular history. It’s a tale that documents the power of grassroots organizing, the importance of the Young Lords and other 1960s radical movements, and the educational obstacles endemic to historically oppressed communities.
I finished my second year as an assistant professor of English at Hostos a few weeks ago, and while I was tidying the end-of-semester detritus in my office, I took a picture of the fastidious four-month wall calendar I maintained since the term:
For a full time, 4-5 position, this was a relatively “light” term thanks to both what CUNY calls “junior faculty release time” (which relieves profs in their first five years from 24 hours of teaching) and my service as a faculty advisor to our writing center. It took me nearly a year to fully grok how “hours” work for full-time staff, but here’s the short of it (in case any of my friends in wealthy R1 institutions want to know what they’re missing out on, and in case any of my friends on the ever-lasting job market are contemplating a career at a community college): full-time CUNY instructors at the 2-year colleges teach 27 hours per year, meaning 5 then 4 three-hour courses each semester, respectively. (Getting assigned to 6-hour developmental courses reduces the total number of courses you teach each semester, but it still amounts to a lot of hours in the classroom. ) You’re also required to hold a few office hours a week in addition to your service. I didn’t formally learn much about “service” in grad school, but a large part of “service” translates to “many, many meetings.” In short, this Spring I managed to secure myself a schedule in which I taught only one course (!) and thus was ostensibly responsible for coming in twice a week to teach it.
Or so I thought. That sounded great, right? Like, damn I have to come in twice a week? Imagine all the articles I’ll finish! Imagine the book proposal coming together! The conference talks! But look at that calendar. This is the thing: I still had to attend all those meetings and events and trainings. I had to lead PDs for Writing Center tutors on various Fridays. FRIDAYS!? (The former high school teacher in me is shaking her head at my precious new standard for daily life, of course.)
All this busyness, for which the idea of a light schedule had ill-prepared me, meant that I discovered a weird axiom that is probably applicable to many jobs in service- and teaching-heavy institutions:
No matter how many hours you think you’ve secured for writing and research, meetings will take up all the space anyway.
No one can “see” you working alone on your book, deleting, suffering, rewriting, suffering, ILL-ing books from CUNY libraries in other boroughs (FYI I have been told by our circulation librarian I’m the second-highest user of their services of all the faculty), suffering, and doing all that reading that goes along with it. So that invisible labor—which, to be clear, is also required of CUNY 2-year college professors for tenure (though many community colleges don’t have this requirement)—doesn’t seem to count quite as much in the short term because it’s invisible. Saying “no” to committee invitations and professional development events is extremely difficult.
Down the road, I’ve been assured and counseled, the end result of putting effort into writing and research actually counts more heavily toward tenure and promotion than the fact that you’ve attended 63 meetings in a semester. But the daily work of protecting that time, and the superficial cost of doing so, make it difficult. I’m realizing that as someone who is passionate about research and writing, the work of protecting that time while developing a meaningful relationship to the daily life of my extremely vibrant college is going to be the serious work I have to do for myself in this position.
So this has been the main lesson of my second year, made visual by this white-board calendar. I will conclude this post by zooming into my favorite event of every Spring:
I’ve been thinking about an adage that one of my education grad-school professors would repeat (I got a Master’s in Teaching Adolescent English from Fordham in 2006). It went something like this: a good pedagogical practice will work as well in a pre-school as it does in a college classroom. Good pedagogy is sound, no matter what the level of instruction. It doesn’t sound as deep as I remember it sounding at the time—I think the professor phrased it better somehow—but I think about it when a college instructor criticizes what I do (sometimes implicitly) as “baby-sitting.” For instance, I require that students use calendars to organize themselves, and I give them a few points every once in a while for maintaining it. I know that this doesn’t sound as deep as analyzing Socrates or whatever, but students appreciate the training. If a student doesn’t have their own calendar, I give them what I call “Milsom’s Bootleg Calendar.” It’s just a Word document I’ve made with a blank calendar on it. The calendar includes all the important semester dates (the last day to withdraw, for instance). I now have a couple students who find me at the beginning of the semester requesting copies of the Bootleg Calendar, so I always make extra copies. When I taught high school, I would identify the students who liked to draw, and I’d get them to illustrate the Bootleg Calendars before I made copies. I hope to do something like this again.
I say all this because making college accessible to my students—people who have been “historically excluded” from higher education—means training them how to organize their time. Most of them work full-time, many have families to care for, and yet they also are balancing a full course load in order to remain eligible for financial aid. Few use calendars to arrange their busy lives, so getting students to develop the habit of self-organization can make a huge difference.
When I was in fifth grade, each student in our class received an old-fashioned, spiral-bound student planner which we were forced to use. My teacher Miss Smith would draw a replica of it on the board—very fastidious—and would show us what and how to write in it. My school provided these calendars for all of us through eighth grade. They were a part of the curriculum, in a sense. When we got to high school, I remember that a few of my classmates still would purchase them on their own because they loved them so much. I can’t remember a year of my life, since fifth grade, that I haven’t used some sort of planner. My elementary middle school teachers were very deliberate in how they trained us to make use of planners. Their support meant that by the time we entered high school, planning was a habit.
The fact that many of my students—whose average age is 27—have not been trained to manage their time means that they start out with a disadvantage. The fact that they gotten this far in their education without that skill in the first place is a testament to their gumption and dedication.
I have spent a lot of time this semester, and while preparing to teach freshman writing composition this semester, thinking about assessment. I’m experimenting with not grading essays, “ungrading,” and questioning the feedback I provide to students about their writing. I also am trying to figure out ways to make the students’ essays feel more public to them, creating an audience of actual readers for them to write for, and wondering how other people do this in their classes. I’ll report back later on what I’ve found out in this experimental semester.
Meanwhile, outside my own classroom bubble, a lot of people have been prompted to discuss assessment in the wake of Professor Asao B. Inoue’s recent speech at the CCCC conference in Pittsburgh. I’ve been re-reading that speech, and don’t want to comment on that here. But after reading it, I came across a post on a grad-school friend’s Facebook wall, asking how we grade students’ vernacular. Like, do we take off points if a student doesn’t use proper Standard American English?
I think my response encapsulated my current feelings on this matter, and I just want to preserve it here for posterity:
Ah! I have been wondering this as well for a while and have spent the past year realizing there is a whole field of people who study this stuff deeply. First, check out Asao Inoue’s Presidential speech from this year’s CCCC conference (the MLA of Rhet-Comp world). It was an indictment: https://docs.google.com/…/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETC…/edit…. Next, you can read his book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies,” which goes into depth about this: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/inoue/ecologies.pdf. There are other people who talk about this stuff really well. Alfie Kohn (https://www.alfiekohn.org/) is a good place to start.
Here’s the short of it: I hear a lot of people say: “You have to teach them how to write SAE in order to give them access to blahblahblah cultural capital blahblahblah.” First, this is racist because it presupposes that people don’t know how to register switch. Second, no, that’s not true. Third, good writing is about communication and meaning. Frankly, I’d take Cardi B on politics any day over Trump. She’s a former stripper from Highbridge and Trump has his Ivy League credibility, yet her ad hoc political statements have more substance than he’s capable of regurgitating from a teleprompter. People are surprised by her depth because we are racist: we’re conditioned to look down on people like her. So what are we looking for in communication? Substance? or things that tag a speaker as having “cultural capital” aka “white”? I like to take a direct approach in the classroom about this: we discuss register switching, the whiteness of academic English, and racism. My experience is that my students have already internalized a lot of racist rhetoric about their vernaculars and are relieved to discuss these things openly.
I would also like to state, for the record, that there technically is no “Standard American English.” Some countries do have an official language of record (France, for instance), which is why it is noteworthy that we do not have one. I try to muster the courage to say this once in a while in official settings, but I’m often met with disbelief and frustration. If we are to accept that there is no standard, then what, in fact, are we experts of after all? And how do we maintain our hierarchical position above students if we have no “standard” on which we lean to support our claims of superiority? (Bad mixed metaphor, I know.)
I did not spend ten years as a graduate student just learning about grammar, after all. I did study a lot of history, and most of it (history) is a record of a world without dictionaries. Even Shakespeare himself spelled his name differently on different occasions.
I’ve been meaning, since last summer when I read this book, to begin to post more about what I’m reading. Mainly as a strategy for documenting this for myself (since I’m the main audience of my own blog, according to my own statistics).
Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke, 2017) came out at a time which, for me, was personally very difficult. I had just finished my Ph.D., I had moved back to NYC, I didn’t know whether or not I’d ever be able to teach college again or spend time ever again with the research project I’d spent nearly 10 years developing, and I was coping with the longterm effects of some deeply ignored trauma. When I read Ahmed, who openly discusses the trauma of institutionalized academic work, it felt like a balm. I continue to recommend the book to people who work in institutions—academic, religious, corporate— plagued by sexual and racial trauma.
Book cover of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke 2017)
It was on the heels of reading this book too that I finally developed confidence to teach feminist theory and history in my own courses. I started to talk about it in my high school English class, and then when I moved into the college classroom, I developed a unit on feminism for my composition course.
Something that has taken me aback: Students communicate a sense of relief during the feminism unit. They often don’t know what the term “feminist” means, they (both men and women) recognize themselves and their experiences in the theory presented, and they take ownership of feminism on their own terms. They often share the readings with family members. They look at their personal histories and at their cultural communities through a new lens. The student body at my college is 67% female, and once the discussion gets going, men express amazement at their female classmates’ experiences. Nearly every semester, a heated debate will develop over normative expectations about who should pay for a meal, for instance. This semester, a lesbian student interrupted the debate to describe the way in which paternalistic traditions can ironically impose themselves lesbian relationships too. She made the whole class crack up during a story she told about confusion ensuing about the check at the end of one of her dates.
Anyway, I thank Ahmed for giving me the confidence to go forth as an averred feminist in my career. I also appreciate that Living a Feminist Life gave me more of a background to discuss race as a primary component of feminist discourse. In fact, once again, it was a student who interrupted a discussion about unequal pay to remind us that the statistics I presented (the standard “women make 80-cents on the man’s dollar) really only apply to white women. In a classroom in which I’m the only white person, this sort of point lands heavily. Roxane Gay criticizes what she calls “Capital-F feminism” helpfully for its history of excluding women of color and the LGBTQ* community in Bad Feminist (2014), which is on my syllabus and which my students read avidly. But Ahmed’s chapters on “Diversity Work” in particular forced me to reckon with my own years of white feminist indoctrination. I’m still learning.
The experience of being a feminist is often an experience of being out of tune with others. (Ahmed 40)
My indoctrination as a feminist—a white feminist in particular—began early. In seventh-grade (age 12), in a used book store, I found Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book on sexual violence Men, Women, and Rape. It was old (probably an early edition from the late 1970s), but each moldy yellow page shocked me. On the same used-bookstore shelf, I found Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room. I went around school for a few days after I’d read it asking teachers (who were “alive way back then”) if what the books said was true. “Was it really like that?” I remember asking one. She took me seriously: “Yes.” I guess the only surprise left in store for me was just how little has changed since the late 1970s.
At a yard-sale that year, I bought a hippie kiln-forged handmade mug that had the words “Pro-Choice” carved into it, and you better believe I carried it around with me. Even to my piano camp, where I initiated heated lunch-room debates with the fundamentalist Christians and Catholics I’d grown up with. We debated abortion rights and evolution and the existence of god with the cheerful abandon of young sophists with little, yet, at stake.
I Shot Andy Warhol came out in 1996, and you better believe that my friend Lara and I went to see it at the local art house theater. We bought Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M Manifesto, and I read it on the school bus, hoping for someone to ask me about it. This was my feminist training: flawed, undirected, and white white white. It was a start. It had an effect: it trained me to always observe gender. Even when I became shyer, less confident, depressed, and later traumatized—unable to speak up—I still noticed.
One consequence of my feminism has been that I have felt like a burden. Ahmed’s book felt like a “relief” to me was because it recognizes the loneliness of being what she calls the feminist killjoy. (Her blog, which carries this word as its title, was how I learned about her in the first place.) This is why she concludes the book with what she calls the “killjoy survival kit” – because “becoming a killjoy can feel, sometimes, like making your life harder than it needs to be” (235). Because when you know that things are bad, and you feel compelled to bring up the badness, you are responsible for “messing up” the meeting dynamic, or making someone realize their friend sexually harasses women, or “ruining” the simple pleasures of listening to “Beat It.” You don’t get kudos or raises or promotions from pointing this out to people. Ahmed’s reification of the feminist killjoy feels so familiar to me because it’s a role I’ve inhabited for a long time. Ahmed describes this process:
I have already noted how when diversity workers talk about walls, the walls become phantom walls, as if we bring the walls into existence by talking about their existence. (Ahmed 142)
You describe the problem and then are blamed for creating the problem. When you describe a problem, you are betraying solidarity.
A friend of mine recently gave me some advice after sitting and patiently listening to me list my woes about conflicts I have with people. She told me that I probably need to set aside more time in my week to be with feminists. She explained that there are people out there that already agree with me, to whom I don’t need to justify feminism. I realized that I’m in a defensive grip – maybe from growing up in a conservative place, maybe as a result of being a member of a misogynistic religious community for so long, and maybe as a result of my own trauma. But my friend is right. After all, as Ahmed explains in the intro, “to live a feminist life is to live in very good company” (17). Quite a relief.
I have long loathed all the conventions of syllabus writing, largely because I have seen how semester after semester, we all put so much stock into what we put into them—read my post from the fall and witness how much I agonized last semester about typeface sizes as a way of procrastinating from actually writing the damn thing, and read about my deepish dive into accessibility statements—just to see them discarded within weeks. That is not to say that I don’t think those things are important to consider, but I also sometimes think that we fetishize the syllabus and its contents, agonizing about what it says about us and our beliefs, as a way of imagining we have more control than we do. Sure, it gives you a sense of comfort in times of duress. (How often are we told to put things in because, you know, “CYA”?” Cover your ass”? -a big refrain in public education.) And when students mess up or don’t comply, it’s a great, exculpatory relief for us to be able to say, “Well it’s on the syllabus! You should have read it!” (Do you say “in” or “on”? I say “on” for some reason. Probably regional.) I also know that I’m insecure about my inability to predict or pace my courses when I’m planning them out. I have been in a classroom teaching literature and writing for eleven years now, and I really struggle with this.
Also, I know that our institutions scrutinize our syllabi. I suspect partly that is because they are scrutable, material objects. (One piece of feedback I received on mine was that my list of books was not in MLA format. I didn’t know that was a requirement. I don’t think it is–it’s just an unwritten convention of my department.)
So much energy gets expended upon syllabi while our actual teaching and the ways in which we treat students go unscrutinized. And that’s fine with me. I’m thankful for the relative freedom I have day-to-day in the college classroom, so please, scrutinize my syllabi all you want! Public school teachers in New York City—where I taught high-school English for four years—can expect unannounced drop-ins and often paranoia-inducing surveillance (and don’t get me started on the cameras put into classrooms in Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools). And I never had to write a syllabus when I taught high school! (We had a curriculum we could follow. Totally different.)
This is all to say that this semester, I’ve written an essay, and I’m slapping it right on the front of the syllabus. Sounds boring. Probably. But at least it includes a picture of Marvin Gaye, whose What’s Going On? album and song are going to structure the theme of the course.
Syllabus Essay
Syllabus Essay
I’m putting this all there partly to have something to point to when I tell them to write an essay. It foregrounds the actual work of our course: writing about stuff we care about. It shows that I am a writer too, and I am insecure about how I write. It does things I expect of their writing: it includes parenthetical citations, probably has some errors or typos, includes a block quotation, and has an MLA Works Cited at the end. The essay also rationalizes the course’s focus (read the end), which is inspired by the story I read about why Obie Benson wrote the song. (Al Benson helped write the lyrics.) After witnessing police shoot thousands of protesters during the “Bloody Thursday” protest in Berkeley in May 1969 . . . No, just read what I wrote, because I find myself on the verge of re-writing the essay. The story is moving and felt just so pertinent in this era of MAGA hats and walls and family separations.
One other thing I’d like to reflect on here is that when I was writing the essay for the syllabus, I was noticing the way in which I was thinking about the students reading it. A lot (most?) of my students were not born in the U.S., so they might not know about things like the “National Guard” or the fact that Ronald Regan was governor of California and was also a U.S. president in the 1980s. I assume also that a bunch of my U.S.-born students wouldn’t know this. Heck, I didn’t actually know exactly what the National Guard was until I just looked it up. There are ways of presenting students with sophisticated ideas (which they can handle) that don’t presume prior knowledge in a patronizing or punitive way. I try to attend to that in my classes and by telling students to look up things on their phones the second they don’t know a word, or when they haven’t heard of an event. (I also really try to change the narrative they’ve heard from a lot of profs and teachers not to use Wikipedia. As someone who edits Wikipedia for fun and is familiar with its standards, I think this is garbage advice, and I bet literally everyone who gives this advice uses Wikipedia.) This is particularly important when you teach a lot of first-generation college students and students from other countries. You have to make things seem accessible, and you have to not be a jerk about it. As an aside: I was just in England for a research trip, and I didn’t even know how to order a god damn hot cup of delicious coffee with half and half in it! Because the whole culture of coffee in England is TOTALLY different, and I just got confused at every turn. I mean, that’s just coffee, not my college education. And I literally study British language and history and literature as a profession. I tweeted about this here:
I plan to force students to read my essay on the first day of class. I’ll use it as an opportunity to teach them how to annotate. We’ll talk about the citations and how they’re punctuated. (And I’ll see who the confident readers are based on who volunteers.) We’ll talk about the fact that I left in curse-words from the original quotations—I anticipate that this will shock some of them. And we will talk about the questions I raise at the end of the essay. After we read this, I’m going to show them Cardi B’s Twitter video about the wall as an example of how to approach inquiry like this. She’s well-informed about politics and political debates, she’s a Dominican from the Bronx—like tons of my students, and she’s asking provocative questions about things that don’t make sense in the world that should be fixed. Like the fact that people are working without getting paid on behalf of a president who wants to build a wall. She also raises issues of “respectability” (cf Higgenbotham) that I want to talk about.
To end the first class, I will let students write for a bit about questions they have about “what’s going on” in the world today. To raise the stakes a little bit, to make it more fun, and to adjust them to moving around and publicly sharing their ideas with their classmates, I’ll let them loose to put some of their questions on the board. I hope it will be entertaining, and I also hope that it will make them interested in the course. For a lot, if not most of these students, it will be LITERALLY THEIR FIRST DAY EVER OF COLLEGE, and I want them to feel like their voices are interesting and needed. I read somewhere that something like 60% of college students never talk in their classes, so I hope to put these students in the 40% by the end of the first day!
Alexandra L. Milsom 