Diving Lessons

Four years ago my friends and I, inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, hiked to, and bungee jumped from the Bridge to Nowhere in the San Gabriel Mountains. There are a few reasons why this was significant to me. 1) I have an intense fear of hiking that dates back to elementary school. 2) I have a fear of heights. 3) This adventure served as a metaphor for taking the plunge into a new career: teaching English. Even though I had been teaching music for nine years, switching to a different department felt like starting something entirely new, and I felt scared and inadequate. There’s one thing of which I am sure: To affect change in my life, I have to get uncomfortable. I have to face my fears, dive into the dark and have faith that, eventually, I will find the light.

This semester I learned that teaching composition always involves plunging into the unknown, taking risks, trying new things, being vulnerable. As a teacher, I may feel resistant to new strategies; my students may feel resistant to new ideas, but there’s no excuse for not trying. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, toss it and try the next idea. I’ve learned that free writing is a powerful tool and inquiry is indispensable. I’ve learned never to take my students for granted. They are resources rich with knowledge, experience, insight. Don’t underestimate their capacity to learn and to teach. And in those awkward moments when I’ve made a mistake and feel like melting into a puddle, I can take comfort in knowing that those are the best opportunities for growth.

Last Friday at Compton was awful. It was the last actual class meeting prior to the final exam. Two young men, both African American, came sauntering in after having been on hiatus for several weeks. (Our class only meets once per week.) One came in an hour late. Not only did they return without having contacted me by email, but they immediately jumped on their mobile phones and began chatting with one another. When I made a remark about their disappearance, they both refuted, "I got my paper!" 

Inside, I was livid. I struggled to control my anger. I even took a break during which I did a little soul searching for answers. But I was mad. My Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) training told me to try and embrace the gentlemen for returning, but these two were so brazen, so audacious, that I lost empathy. 

One came up to shove an essay in my face during a time when I wasn't collecting essays. It was an essay that was due three weeks ago, not a draft of the final research essay that was due that day. He wanted to hand it in without the cover sheet that was required. I gave into my ego. "You need to include the cover sheet," I quipped, clearly exasperated. "What cover sheet?!" he demanded. "I discussed this essay over a month ago. If you were here, you would know." He picked his essay up off the desk. "You not gon' take it?" he asked. "Not without the cover sheet," I smirked. "Man, f*ck this!" he huffed before storming out. 

I wanted to give him a lecture on responsibility, but I had done so before to no reform. I was frustrated for him. I saw him as a son, such an adorable young man, whom I saw as having a great ability to excel yet purposefully failing and having so little an opinion of me that he thought I would be a willing participant in his failure. That's what made me most upset. Why on earth would he think that I would subscribe to his BS? Who has done this before? How much has gotten away with just by being adorable and playing the "black victim" card?

His buddy lingered for a while before he finally came up to show me the beginnings of his final research paper. He only had three paragraphs. There were zero quotes and no citations. Much of his words were plagiarized. He, too, balked, "Maaaaan, what am I supposed to do? How do I do that?" With him, I was even less patient. He had approached me with a fairly chauvinistic attitude throughout the semester. I smiled and told him that I had taught MLA format and how to quote and cite on the days that he was absent and that he could go to the writing lab if he needed help. He gathered his belongings and left, taking the rest of the tension in the classroom with him.

Later, I chatted with my SI about the situation. The SI said he would've been meaner. Indeed, the guys had been wandering in and out of class on the days when they were there, and their displays of disrespect were outright in their undermining of my authority. 

Still, I felt like crap. Two young black men just got away. Two young black men now think of me as a b*tch, and I'd be okay with that if they had at least learned some personal responsibility. 

Does cultural sensitivity equal making excuses for the failures of black students? What could I have done differently while still maintaining authority and integrity?

Rust Never Sleeps

            I wish I had read Dr. Cauthen’s article earlier in the semester; a free writing assignment asking students to describe their ideas of Utopia would have produced some interesting papers and lively class discussion.  My reflection on this past semester triggered a flare-up of impostor syndrome, as I regretted not demanding more critical thinking from my students.  As the subordinate, I’m not sure how I would have done this (Friday workshops are my only sphere of influence.), but I should have tried harder.  I should have gotten in their faces about not utilizing the resources at their disposal.  The prof I work with focused on grammar drills and various forms of composition, and the students never had to dig very deep to write their papers.  I wonder if their ideal societies would have been private/moral or public/political.

             Given the state of political discourse in this country, social anarchism is looking pretty good and the philosophy is not entirely at odds with my religious beliefs.  When I’m feeling optimistic, Utopia is a society in which power is only used for the common good, and no gender, race, class, or culture is privileged over another.  Christians – well, some of them – believe this will happen in the future through God’s grace.  My point here is not to proselytize, though.

When I think about what I could do as an individual to make this happen, I’m overwhelmed by the task.  The prospect of joining with a sufficient number of like-minded people to get this done is daunting as well.  Modern society would have to be overhauled!  We couldn’t have any big cities because that would concentrate power.  We would have to become vegans because raising livestock uses too much land and other scarce resources.  We would need to have either a worldwide currency or operate on the barter system.  Who would decide how goods and services are valued?  Capitalism depends on economic inequality, so that would have to go.  Have you ever tried to get consensus with even ten people?  Try it with thousands or millions!  It only took a paragraph for me to go from believing to doubting.

My students would have benefitted from this type of mental exercise, and it could have pushed them to be engaged in the political process.  I’m hardly one to chastise them for being complacent, though.  I vote, and I write my elected representatives once in a while, but that isn’t much.  I wonder what it would take for my private morality to go public.

When You Assume…

            Reading in Zamel’s “Strangers in Academia” about being more “reflective about teaching” has had its desired effect (519).  However, discoveries as a result of my reflection are a mixed bag.  Do I always believe in my students’ potential?  Well, mostly, but there are one or two that I wonder about, particularly after the fifth or sixth time I have explained something.  But how much of that is on me?  I did explain the issue in a variety of ways with multiple examples, but I didn’t insist that student X take notes as we talked, and I didn’t assign him extra work on the problem area, which I am entitled to do.  Do I ever conflate poor speech with limited intellectual ability?  Um, I would like to invoke my Fifth Amendment right, please.

            “Remediation as a Social Construct” touched on many of the same assumptions as Zamel’s article (Hull, et al).  One teacher interviewed dismisses her students’ life experience and sees a lack of “academic experience” (301).  On reflection, I can honestly say that I highly value the experience and knowledge my students bring, but I do lament how standardized testing has sucked the creativity out of their thinking.  On the other hand, I am guilty of falling back on the IRE model for class discussions when I ask a question and I can hear the crickets outside.  I suppose I have made many mistakes as a SIL, but at least I haven’t assumed that poor performance is the result of moral turpitude.  Seriously, how is this relic of Puritanism still a thing?

The Perfect World (Utopia)

I was reading about the free-writing exercise on utopia.  After reading all the discussions and hesitations of students I think that “utopia” is a sort of personal and mythical world based on one’s perspective, where everybody would be excluded.  Probably most of us, if not all, have in some instances of our lives, dreamed about building a better world especially one that fixes “all social issues” that afflict societies in general.  When I think about it I wonder how many people would be interested on hearing a personal utopia proposal, especially if that envisioned world would be called after my name, “The land of Marisol where there is no suffering.”  When I was younger I used to speak it out all the time, I would talked about my ideas of a perfect world, but I gained a lot of enemies because of that.  Although, I believe that I am a committed person and that I would be willing to change the world, especially for those who are living under oppression, I cannot say it loud, even now, that I have grown up to a mature individual.  The fact that I recognize my powerlessness of transforming the world places constraints on my conscious mind, somehow.  As a young girl I was living in this unrealistic world, which I believe, caused me disappointment and emotional distress because real world and life are very tangible and hard, and you cannot tell people how to behave.  With time I started to understand that what I believe is perfect, for others, it is just the opposite.  I do believe that we can make little changes in people’s lives, and that, is social justice; humane actions that make you feel a different person, regardless of the world you live in.  I do that because I cannot create a world though on my ideals, however, it is hard to accept why innocent people died and nobody does anything, why there are millions of children starving at this moment, why governments abuse their own people, and so on.  Utopia is nowhere; only exist as a self-perception of the world.

Rescuing the Baby from the Bathwater

            Something precious has been lost amid the zeal with which composition professors since the 70s have privileged the students’ own writing as the sole text in composition classes.  In his article “A Relationship Between Reading and Writing:  A Conversational Model,” Charles Bazerman calls for teachers to reexamine the “interplay between reading and writing,” and he reminds us that all written communication is part of a broader “ongoing” conversation (157-8).

            My English 109 students have been working on a persuasive essay and have been given several professionally-written essays as models, yet these models were never discussed in class.  Inspired by Bazerman’s discussion of “reacting to reading,” I decided to have the class analyze the author’s argument in one of these models.  We weighed her evidence for accuracy, fairness, relevance, and sufficiency, and we looked for logical fallacies, which we had discussed in a previous workshop.  Finally, I had the class free write about how persuasive the author was, which of her claims were most persuasive, and whether or not their opinion had changed.  Most importantly, they had to state why they responded as they did:  What was their reasoning?  One student asked if he could write that he was offended by the essay; I told him yes, so long as he explained why he was offended.

            What I had asked the class to do was to “explore their assumptions and framework of thought,” as Bazerman suggests (159).  Only one student had read and annotated the text before class, yet the results of this exercise were encouraging.  Their free writes were some of the most logical, organized, and grammatically-correct papers they had produced in the two semesters we have worked together.  I feel that reading a challenging text, then asking and answering challenging questions about that text led my students to be successful on this assignment.

            The texts we ask composition students to read need not be Shakespeare or Chaucer (although that would make this Lit major very happy), but they should be challenging enough to elicit the kind of discussion and analysis that my students experienced in last Friday’s workshop.  There is room for all types of texts in the composition classroom.

Small Victories

For about three weeks, my students composed interview narratives. They first had to interview someone who had attended a four-year college, two-year college, trade school, or military academy. While they were conducting the interview, they recorded the audio and later wrote a transcript. Then they used the transcript to compose a narrative. 

When the transcripts were due, I was disappointed that about two-thirds of the class did not turn it in. Excuses varied from “My interviewee cancelled” to “I didn’t feel like doing it” to “I forgot.” I immediately began calling parents, relying on a few responsible students to translate my message to Spanish. The next day, two-thirds of the class had their transcripts. Victory…until it was time to turn in the narrative rough draft. Again, one-third of the class had their drafts; the other two-thirds had their garden variety excuses, the same blues songs they had sung to me a few days prior. I then did something I had never done before: I randomly selected one of their papers, blotted out the name, made photocopies and workshopped it the next day.

I was pleasantly surprised at how engaged my students were in reading their secret peer’s paper. They were generous and honest when they shared what worked well in the narrative, and they were thoughtful and direct when they shared their suggestions regarding character description and development, the sequence of events, transitions, and point of view. A few days later when the final drafts were due, about two-thirds of my students turned in their paper. In my period six, nearly ninety percent turned in a paper. Victory.