Tears and Teaching

Nicole commented below:

There is a story (more of an image, or maybe several stories packed into the image) that you've told quite a few times about your (privileged, white) students "with tears in their eyes" demanding that you tell them what they can do about racism when they first confront racial guilt during one of your classes.

That image/story/moment seems to be something of a touchstone for you, but also it seems that you find the experience(s?) exasperating.

Is that accurate, the observation of your exasperation? And if so, what's exasperating you? Some sense that these kids should have clued in to this reality way before they got to your classroom? Or with being annoyed that they are making a gigantic, drama-filled deal out of "discovering" said reality?

And, exasperated or not, what does this experience of the crying students mean for you as a teacher? Does it/did it significantly change your teaching style?

Also, Jody asked for my thoughts on online adjunct teaching.

I'll try to hit both here.

First, tears and exasperation.

I will answer the first part of the question last, about teaching style. Because my teaching style probably makes room for tears in a way other teaching styles wouldn't. The kids I'm thinking of who have cried (and otherwise emoted quite passionately on this topic) have been first-year students in a required composition class.

The way I taught composition at that time was to hit on about six challenging social topics that I thought would inspire my students to get all riled up and interested in sharing their opinions and thus in learning to write a strong rhetorical essay. In class we did debates and heated discussions and theatre exercises and group writing and all kinds of fun things to get the students intellectually, socially and emotionally involved with each other, the class and the material they were reading/watching. I also always took my first-year students on a field trip to the Smithsonian National Zoo early in the semester. It's an old habit from my preschool teaching days. I wanted them to see pandas while they could, since pandas probably won't be on the planet by the time they have kids of their own. I wanted to give them non-alcoholic options for entertaining themselves and I wanted to force them to learn to use the Metro. The field trip was always outside of class time and voluntary, but usually at least half of them would come.

In short, I paid attention to building trust and intimacy in my classroom because we were going to be talking about difficult things they had all been taught not to discuss in polite company.

So sometimes I got tears as a result of their learning about some of the history of the U.S government and American Indians, or about Christopher Columbus and what he did to the indigenous people on the islands he landed on, or about lynching (including the carnivalesque, celebratory atmosphere so many lynchings had). I think their tears and other dramatic displays were about their own exasperation at having never learned about this stuff before, and shock at discovering what they considered themselves to be heirs to.

I didn't find them exasperating at all. I expect the first response of basically good people (ie: my students) to be horror and maybe even guilt at these parts of history. They were just 18 and learning for the first time. But I was certainly exasperated along with them that they had no idea about any of it before they took my class. As one kid told me "I've learned more American history in this English class than I learned in AP American history last year!" They were horrified to learn about Columbus chopping off people's hands because they failed to bring in their daily quota of gold, I was horrified to learn that their fancy schools--public or private--hadn't taught them about it earlier. Teaching these kids fresh out of hoity-toity high schools from suburban New York, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, etc. laid bare for me just what and how they had been taught previously to think about the world and their place in it and how hard the systems they came from had worked to miseducate them so as not to see problems with something that was clearly working in their favor.

If they started with teary guilt, I tried to get them around to seeing that guilt wasn't helpful, but perhaps a sense of responsibility was in fact, quite called for and then kind of leave them to decide how they wanted to take responsibility. Most times, they would ask me what they should do. I would give them some ideas, but tell them that was really their business. And since so many of them wanted to go into politics or public service, they really did have some concrete options for making real changes in their career paths that might address their concerns.

So tears are a repeating story for me when I think about teaching Race in the U.S. 101 because they are a dramatic illustration of the work that's been done to erase certain things for certain people and the work that needs to be done to recover the palimpsest behind AP American History. A few teary students suddenly re-evaluating their whole (okay, only 18-year-long) lives is a moving thing to encounter as a teacher. I tend to love my students dearly and think the very best of them. One of the reasons I teach is because it turns me into a better person. I tend to be quite annoyed with the general run of humanity much of the time, but hand me a classroom of bushy-tailed (or even cynically posing) young adults and I am Mother Teresa.

Funny story. One time, after teaching "How Capitalism Works 101" and an Andre Codrescu essay about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, a student blurted out, "What am I going to do? My father is a corporate lawyer!" No kidding, that really happened. I told her to settle down, stop fretting and use his money to fund the revolution.

Another student whose father was law school buddies with dubya (again, no kidding) called him up and said, "Dad how can you be a [you guessed it] corporate lawyer, if you were a philosophy major in college? Philosophy is about seeking the Truth!"

See? Aren't they adorable?

So the tears don't bother me except as they reveal the shortcomings of U.S. education. Then yes, I am definitely exasperated. And it is a touchstone. When I start to get annoyed at someone's ignorance about race, I think of those tears and figure a whole bushel of people never took a class like that one and so haven't have their big breakthrough about white privilege yet.*

How does this relate to online teaching?

It's a whole other ballgame, exasperating for its own reasons.

Online teaching per se is not the greatest gig I ever had. The technology is annoying and the support is not great and the syllabus is set in stone and written by someone other than me several years ago when the book we use for the class (that I am required to use) was in its first edition, rather than its second. So half the material for the class (again, not generated by me) is inaccurate. And they won't let me fix it. That is, I fix it every single semester by tweaking the syllabus as necessary, but they won't let me do a grand redesign of the class. I think it's because I'm a peon or something. But in the world of online teaching everyone is a peon. And anyway, fine, so don't let me redesign the class, but have someone do it! But no. So that's really a pain.

The students I teach online are pretty much a total demographic opposite of those kids in DC. Most of my students are African American (possibly because I am teaching African American literature, but I do think the school--brick and mortar and online--is majority African American anyway). Most of them are adults with kids, maybe partners, usually full-time jobs and many of them are military or military spouses. Over the summer I had a single mom of three who had three weeks' notice that she was going back to Afghanistan (again) and had to relocate her kids out of state with relatives on that short notice.

Some of my students are quite dazzlingly talented. They're keen readers and great writers. But some are honestly what I'd call barely literate. And it's awfully hard to do well in a class whose format is exclusively writing when you aren't sure what makes for a complete sentence. Most students fall between the extremes. But the ones at the low end exasperate me for the same reasons the tears exasperate me. These students are often quite sharp at picking up on concepts and themes in the literature we're reading. They "get it" right away even if they can't write a clear essay about it. They've been miseducated not to be able to express themselves.

(I have a real sense of where they come from, too, because the high school where I taught in DC sent many kids on to the school whose online program I am teaching for. I can picture them. I saw a lot of kids leave that school with HS diplomas who couldn't make sense of their own horoscope in the daily newspaper. I use that example because every day, I had kids asking me to explain their horoscope to them. The school got free papers. After a few requests of this sort, I started using the horoscopes to teach them reading comprehension and vocabulary on the sly. By the way, for a while there, I was teaching at the high school during the day while also teaching an evening class at the university. Talk about the social bends.)

Mind you, I don't think there's a smoke-filled room where bald white guys are saying "keep lynching out of AP history and make sure the poor Black kids don't have enough books." But there kind of almost is.

They don't pay me enough to work as hard as I'd need to work to get the low-end students up to snuff. But I do focus very much on writing, and I give them many opportunities to workshop drafts with me and other students and I try really hard to teach them at least one or two basic principals of writing they can take with them into other classes or work, or where ever.

I am somewhat torn about online teaching because it's just not that great for me or for my students. But it's accessible in a way that other education options are not. And many of my students--probably the majority of them--couldn't finish their degrees without doing at least some of the work online. So I am exploited labor and in a way, the students are cash-cows for the school (though I do think the program I teach for is as good as online education can get) and you can only do so much for the ones who are slipping through the cracks, but in another way, I get to work with a population who I really care about and want to see educated and getting better jobs and more respect and other things a degree can help bring.

And it's a convenient job. My teaching is all asynchronous because students can literally be scattered across the globe (I had a Navy guy on a ship in the Mediterranean once), so I check in at my convenience and I can take the job anywhere there's a $t@bucks with wireless access. I took it to Hawaii last summer. And there are five semesters a year in the is program so I can pick up a job almost anytime and get some spare cash. I took the summer job at the last minute after we were matched with Ivy last summer, so we could pay her living expenses. So it's a handy job to have. I suppose I'd recommend it for limited income, keeping your toe in the door of academia (maybe just a toenail, really) and meeting some interesting people. And it is the Way of the Future when it comes to higher education. It's so "cost effective" that universities can't resist it. Having some experience in it is probably an asset to a real academic resume (I go back and forth sometimes about whether it's an asset or a liability--probably depends on your field. Snobby English? Mostly liability I guess.)

And now I am going to end this tome wihtout a pithy conclusion. Again, I'm posting every day, what more do you want?

*Which reminds me of something that happened at the adoption conference that I need to blog about.

Comments

[regine]

Great posts, Shannon. I use the plural to indicate the previous ones as well; have been so busy with my FD's cases that I haven't browsed your blog in a while. You don't disappoint. ..

[Meg]

I'm delurking to say thanks for your insights about teaching online.

My husband and I are both higher ed peons--writing center work for me and adjuncting for him--and we've been debating about whether to apply for online adjunct positions at a local cc. Part of our hesitation has been due to lack of information about the challenges of online teaching relative to a traditional classroom. This is very helpful.

On a mostly unrelated note, while I'm here I've got to say that you have fantastic kids and an amazing family (which you already know). I love reading about you guys.

[Wendy]

Great post. Here's a question:

I've only been reading you for about 6 months or so, so you've probably covered this, but what kind of agency did you use for your adoptions and about how long did each process take?

Also, a friend mentioned to me that a private adoption would cost about $30,000, which kind of blew me away. I was hoping to use a social service agency like Lutheran Social Services or something similar and thought it would be much cheaper. My friend said that when adopting, you typically pay for the mother's health care. Can you comment on the cost of adoption?

Thanks.