A few minutes after meeting with a student today in the university's library coffee shop area, I thought with a pang that for the past two semesters, I should have chronicled my experiences, week by week, on this blog. This, too, would be a kind of 'labor' and 'birth,' right? I'd just finished meeting with Chase, one of my favorite students, who was in my class last semester as well, and we'd somehow talked our way to him deciding to write about American Idealism as it manifests in sports - specifically in Muhammad Ali's story. He'd been perfectly willing to write a reflective essay on American Idealism connecting to our class's readings this semester, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.
The longer we talked, the more I wondered why I hadn't chosen a sports movie or text as yet another strain of American Idealism - such an important manifestation of the ascension narrative. We talked about how in Ali's case, there are strains at odds with one another; there is the celebrity story - a popular rags (or, for Ali, middle-class) to riches narrative - and there is Ali refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War, or Cassius Clay who changed his name and converted to Islam. We talked about the ways in which popular culture may shift people away from their prejudices by seeping into their affection - and the limitations of this approach. Chase wondered how to avoid having the paper turn into a report on Muhammad Ali, and I told him that the way he was talking about it was already more than a report - that framing it in these ways, delving into these questions, would yield more than a report. He left more excited about his paper than he'd been when we started.
Chase and I share a yearning for California. He's from one of the suburbs near here, but he's sick of winter and is looking into transferring to a California college. And I'm from California, of course - and I get so homesick sometimes. I joke with him that if he gets to transfer, he'd better email me now and then in the depth of winter to torture me with reports of sitting outside in the sunshine and mild air. In his letter at the beginning of this semester, he told me about some music releases he was waiting for; Schoolboy Q was one. I told my oldest son, Justin, and he told me the day the album leaked, so I let Chase know that day. He laughed and couldn't believe I would know this, and I later confessed that I'd been tipped off.
Today I told him that I wouldn't normally be so busy this semester with only one class, but that adjuncts here are trying to unionize and that I've been throwing myself into that effort from early on. He seemed supportive. I told him I currently make $4000 a semester - that I get a check every two weeks for about $420 - and he said that was too low. I didn't hover on my personal pay for long, but just talked about how union organizing has its lows and highs.
At some point - we were waiting for his writing partner, who forgot to show up - we talked about adults complaining about 'the kids nowadays.' He said he'd read something expressing this lament in one of his classes - and then saw that it had been written two hundred years ago. I said I'd read something in Will Durant's volumes of history complaining of the same terrible young boding ill for the future - written in the year 1000. We wondered if it's a displacement of the dissatisfaction older adults feel with their societies and themselves, and a resentment of the young for being young. Or do they just forget? What makes too many adult humans resent their own young so much? Is it positioning themselves as always at odds with the young?
I try to approach my students as if we're all in this semester-long journey together. I'm doing my best to steer us, and they need to row along and help direct us to our destination. It's a flawed metaphor because they'd be in a lot of boats at once, some of them moving them in other directions. But the point is, we're on the same side. I hope. I want them to do as well as possible. And I want us to at least try to create a more democratic relationship in our class. I tell them it's clearly not fully democratic, but that we're maneuvering as best we can within the parameters of formal higher education in our institution.
I'm trying to treat them like adults - free, intelligent adults. Adults, if they're not oppressed and exploited, have some ability to juggle different demands. They might choose to not have everything due on one day. They have some choices about what they labor over. They take their work seriously and don't waste their time laboring to create things that others don't take seriously. At the same time, they're not patronized. So I don't tell students that dull papers are great, and I don't ask them to read them to the class. When students write great papers, I do ask them to read their papers, and I put the paper up on the projection screen at the same time, We talk about their process and their ideas for a bit. We applaud.
I don't know how to speak for what I do or stand for my beliefs about how we should treat students without implying a lack of humility and even an insult toward those who run more authoritarian or even just very different classes. But my focus is my students. I don't know how to compare what we do with what happens in other classes. I also can't help bringing in some of what I've learned from years of raising and teaching kids. So I'm not quite the same as a new teacher who's never taught in any way before. And yet, I don't know how many of my ideas are great, or good, or mediocre, or lousy.
If this had been a humble journal I'd kept for the past year, maybe I'd have avoided too much angst-ridden introspection in some of these posts, or too much preachiness, or other written communications that narrated too much of my internal emotional states rather than the story I've actually been living through. I think it would have been a lot truer to my experiences.
After Chase and I met, I made my way to class a half hour later. It was a draft workshop day. Students in their writing groups of three read their drafts out loud to each other and talked about them a bit. I have some doubts about this aspect of my approach. I need to do better with this.
Before that, Mike presented the last poem of the semester - or rather song. He'd asked me if he could present "The Times They Are A-Changing" by Bob Dylan. He played some of it first with the lyrics up on the projection screen. He was more nervous than I'd imagined he'd be, but I think we enjoyed it. I did, at least.
I sat in on John and Burke's group because Katie couldn't be there, so I decided to lend an extra set of ears and some feedback to their group. They're both writing about the corruption and cruelty in the U.S.'s immigration practices. Both are drawing on Edwidge Danticat's nonfiction memoir about her father and uncle, Brother, I'm Dying. Today I feel overjoyed with how much they've grown in their analysis of this issue.
Katie emailed that she was so sorry that she couldn't be in class, that her chronic diabetes is mixing with her temporary mono to cause complications; the doctors are worried by what looks like enlargement in her spleen. She's worried about how many classes she's missed, she said. I told her I'm not holding those against her - that these health issues aren't her fault, but that if it would work, I'd love to meet with her individually to talk through some crucial questions we discussed one day when she was gone. She responded that she'd love to meet individually and thanked me.
Teaching this way takes time. Some weeks, I feel like all I do is work on my class and work on union-organizing. And the two seem at odds at times - and not just in two commitments pulling at me. Working more hours than I'm paid for is "a labor issue," as one of my tenured friends reminded me my first semester. But I can't help giving all I can to my teaching, at least as long as I can.
In that same tenured friend's class in 2012, we read philosopher Alain Badiou's 2001 book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. [Some points from my presentation summing up that book...]:
He argues against the idea of a general or abstract ‘ethics,’ calling it a “genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such” (3). He instead insists that ethics must be “referred back to particular situations" (3). [I've pulled up my presentation of it now to look back at this.] Badiou says that abstract ethics are grounded in the law against Evil, which means that good only emerges as that which is not Evil. (8).
This prevents the imagining of the Good; it prevents an “affirmative humanity” (15). It stops us from being “faithful to [the] situation”; being faithful would mean “to treat it right to the limit of the possible” (15).This is how I try to teach, or maybe how I HOPE I try to teach.
Badiou says the “reign of ethics” is a “symptom of a universe ruled by … resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will.” This is nihilism (30). This “necessity” is economics – the logic of Capital (30).How do we organize a union focusing on pay for our labor without utterly succumbing to that logic?
There is only a particular ethics connected to a particular person who becomes a subject due to the circumstances of a truth. Ordinarily, “every animal gets by as best as it can,” but when something extra comes along – the event – this “compels us to decide a new way of being” (41).
Education. And it feels more like a series of events that are all tied together. There were my kids; there was friendship; relationship in its many forms - and education woven into all this. Relationships as education, and education as relationships.
The process of truth comes from the decision to be “faithful to an event … by thinking … the situation ‘according to’ the event” (41). This is fidelity for Badiou. This kind of truth is an “immanent break … because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else” (42-43). It is a break because the event “meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation” (43). Through that person’s experience with this ‘event,’ he becomes “in excess of himself,” inscribed from “within time, in an instant of eternity” (45).The best teachers I've known taught and engaged this way, transcending logic in what they could accomplish, living somehow 'in excess of themselves.' I''m trying to be like them. And somehow, contrary to the glorious highs we imagine when focusing on such transformation, I think they do it in the way I should have kept a humble journal, day by day.
Badiou,
Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil. 2001, Reprint. London: Verso, 2002. Print.
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