Day 13: Salute Your Shorts

cardio: 10 mins jumprope, 10 mins Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty-five
crunches: forty
breakfast: egg salad, baguette, vitamins
lunch: Whole Foods salad bar (pea shoots, dandelion shoots or whatever, peas, corn, bleu cheese, Diestel turkey, falafel)
apartment clean?: reasonably

Ask me whether I made it all the way to the men's locker room before I realized that I had not packed my gym shorts, and thus was unable to work out. I had already left the house for the Old English Reading Group, which I was late for; I was not supposed to use up my one day per week (note the change) of working out at home on a day when I had already left the house; I am already behind in a workweek in which I am supposed to complete a draft of my play (by Sunday evening), a full dissertation chapter draft (by Monday evening), and a novel (by Monday 11:59pm). And I should definitely not be wasting my time on the English Grads list-serv:

"The videos [of police brutality at the UC protests] are horrifying indeed.

But to anyone teaching a composition course this semester: remember, as Paolo Freire and Miss Jean Brodie have both pointed out, that to educate is to lead out -- not to put in or deposit or inculcate, which would indeed be the opposite, and which, regardless of your own politics or opinions, is an inherently oppressive act in the classroom.

It is far more revolutionary, and far more effective, to allow the students to reach their own decisions about what is happening here (rather than to inform them about your own), and to provide them with the critical thinking tools to make their own opinions, and actions, duly complex and mature. Rather than simply swaying people one way or another, you'll help build a group of educated people who is not so easily swayed.

In other words, the most revolutionary thing you can possibly do is what you were already doing, assuming you were doing it right in the first place, since our composition classes are supposed to center on critical thought. Lead out, draw out, the natural instincts for critical thinking that are already in place. Guide them the tools to go out and research, deeply, what is going on. Never present them with any material, however straightforward it may seem, that is 'just the way it is.' Because no one, and certainly not any of us, is capable of a statement free of subjectivity, and that is exactly what we're trying to teach these students.

If there are students in your classroom (and there are) whose current reading of the situation is opposed to yours (and mine), it is still your job to encourage those students to find the words and voice to think through, investigate, and communicate their reading. And once such a reading is exposed to the critical thought necessary for such an investigation, the reading will change because the student will change. Any other approach will cause a dissenting mind to (rightly) clam up at the back of the room and grumble about 'these liberals, making assumptions, wouldn't hear me anyway, wasting more of our time.'

At NYU, in September 2001, when our chancellor ordered classes to reconvene after only a week (part of the 'return to normalcy' thing -- you want to talk euphemistic emails?) my TA walked into our 45A recitation and said, 'In the coming months, you are going to be bombarded with text. You probably already have been. It is our job, as literary scholars, to parse, analyze, and closely read texts, to uncover not only what they say, or what they appear to say, but how they say it. So in the coming months, you will discover just how important our work can be.' And then she produced three handouts, each one with a different text that represented a different 'side' of the 9/11 attacks -- Pat Robertson, who blamed LGBT and Communist New Yorkers for bringing down God's wrath, a blogger in Palestine who laid the blame entirely on aggressive US foreign policy in the Middle East, and a conscpicuously 'centrist' article. And then she said, 'Well? Go. Analyze. Let's discuss the form, not just the content, of these texts, and how they relate to agenda (or the construction of an agenda), etc etc.'

I would suggest that if anyone is going to bring up recent UC events in their classroom, they run a similar exercise, bring in texts for interpretation, etc. In any case, open a discussion, but don't comandeer it. Know that you, too, have an agenda, and that in that classroom, you are very powerful and loud -- though it is on you to get students to claim more power, and more voice, for themselves, regardless of whether you completely disagree with them. Feel free to steal my TA's ideas, as I have. I will not post this to bSpace.

Let's remember that a video from the grassroots, like an email from the top down, like our own classroom plans, is a text, one that we cannot simply take at face value. It is part of our job description not to take it at face value. Or we can do it on our own time; but when we are educating, our responsibility is to train students to read more deeply, think more complexly, and so forth."