Juneteenth in Richmond

Today is Juneteenth, and has involved a confluence of appropriately themed events.

This morning I read the first chapter in Beverly Tatum's Can We Talk About Race, one of the texts assigned for the MAT program at Earlham. She discusses the desegregation of schools after the Brown v. Board of Education supreme court case, then follows with an explanation of the re-segregation of schools in the 80s and 90s after subsequent cases allowed schools to evade the integration measures.

Tatum talks not only about the disparity in performance brought about my segregation in schools, but also the challenge of successfully integrating without bulldozing black identity out of the students. After all, of the 3 million teachers in the US, only 7.5% are African American. Hence, most black students are taught by white, female teachers, a curriculum that has little to do with their identity and heritage. She pointed out that in their majority black schools, black students had texts drawn from black artists and black history, (poems from Langston Hughes, words from spirituals, biographies of black leaders...) which, particularly in early days of integration, though today as well, traces of black identity are hard to find.

One of the moving parts of Tatum's essay was her retelling of a teacher's experience in a class that was examining a text that identified the British pioneers as the earliest settlers in Texas. "Knowing full well that Mexicans (his ancestors) lived in what is now known as Texas long before any New Englanders arrived, the student blurted, "What are we, animals or something?"

The class had a discussion of how racism manifests in the school system they are part of. "And they described the stance they took in order to resist that racism and yet not be thrown out of school. It amounted to nothing less than full-blown and cooperate not-learning." (Tatum)

This, of course, makes a teacher's heart sink.  Tatum says the answer is a) making sure the environment reflects minority identity as well as majority (have black teachers, administrators, art, texts) and b) affirm students' identities by asking them "Who are you? What do you want to do?" and affirming, "You can do it!"

I might well have black students in my student teaching classroom this year, and will likely have Hispanic students, and I'm looking forward to seeing how my mentor teacher engages their individual histories.

At West Richmond Friends a special service had been organised for Juneteenth, featuring music (Deep River, among other evocative pieces) a children's story about the new $20 bill with Harriet Tubman on it, and a message about Frederick Douglass's speech about the meaning of the fourth of July for the Negro in which he provides a stirring example of using an opportunity to speak out to present an uncomfortable truth.

Bob, who brought the message, emphasised that it is worth celebrating the journey of a nation, much more than its beginning.

The closing query, before silent worship, was "What has this journey of progress meant for me, both personally and as part of the groups I'm part of?"

In considering progress made for women since the original July 4th, I can vote, can go to school, can marry a woman if I want to, can run for public office, can contemplate a life without children, can start my own business, can teach economics, can fight in combat ... and I can wear a skirt and apron, have children, and bake bread all day if I want to! Of course, my privilege makes much of this possible, but I'm conscious of the magnitude of the progress anyway.

Fiction for children

In the annual start of summer fiction issue of the New Yorker several writers contribute essays under the common banner "childhood reading". An intriguing theme for net between a handful of the essays is that "children's literature" is really whatever children read. Some of these writers grew up with what would be considered mature stories like Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe. Others, like the reader of The Secret Garden, remarks that its themes of abandonment, cholera, and regret make it heavy handed compared to most modern young adult lit. 

Other contributors experienced lit through everything but reading. Listening to tapes, listening to people, looking up words in the dictionary, (these are the reflections of someone who immigrated at two and didn't write strongly as a child). 

What Rivka Galchen notes is that her memories of what she read are not from books, but from 

"The mysterious “Banacol” stickers on the apples [my mother] peeled for me, the Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies tin, mailings from Ed McMahon, deputized to me, which might make us millions, my parents’ odd names on checks that had pale mountain ranges in the background, mountain ranges that I had been invited to select myself, from the sheet of so many options."

What do you remember reading when you were young? 

I remember reading the cereal box, even more than the activities the nutrition facts, whose scientific words and units of measure (g) meant nothing to me, except how they compared to the corresponding values on Tess's box. 

I remember learning (it was certainly a long and subconscious process) that names were misleading sometimes, like at The Topsham Fair Mall, which was not a mall and was not fair. Part of its uninspired sprawl was the Fairground Cafe, which also inspired confidence and also was a disappointment with its un embellished tune salad on cold white bread. 

 Bananas that were as green as my favorite camp tee shirt were labeled "ripe" in the supermarket. I gradually learned, as everyone does, how dishonesty is woven into the way we use language. 

 More egregiously dishonest use of language for political purposes takes place in the first scene of act three of Julius Caesar which I'm reading now. Cassius says that by cutting life short we actually save ourselves years that we would have spent merely fearing death anyway. This is right after Caesar has been stabbed in public, and Brutus says 

Brutus Grant that, and then is death a benefit.
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, 105 And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the market place,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads,
Let’s all cry ‘Peace, freedom and liberty 

I remember reading my mothers signature and noting the difference between the letters in her name and the letters distinguishable on my permission slip. 

I remember the neon sign at my family's business with the word Office spelled in one coil of green. In places the black paint had flaked off and office looked more like offuce. And I couldn't understand why milk wasn't just called milk, but 2%. I learned to despise the words with pulp stamped across the top of the orange juice carton, not because I disliked pulp, which I didn't, but because it was only cool to like pulp free orange juice among the girls at school. 

And the cars. Some of the first words I could recognize were the names of the cars we referred to by their make. Mom's sable, the family Taurus, Wesley's Mazda. Granny's grand marquis was an enigma with that final s. 

A huge part of learning language is the acceptance of truths we don't understand, or maybe the initial inculcation into the social conceit that we are honest and that things make sense.  

Julius Caesar

This morning I was sitting at the table and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to watch some ballet. I looked on the websites of the New York Times and the Guardian for clips of contemporary ballets or productions of old ones. Here is a piece from the New York City Ballet with Balanchine choreography, but the dancer seems not nearly enraptured enough for my taste, so I abandoned it.

On the Guardian's website my search led me to a series of videos of theatre monologues. I enjoyed this one from King Lear. 

The video that overtook my Saturday, however, is this one featuring Damian Lewis as Antony in Julius Caesar. I have now watched it probably 8 times, and each time my eyes are streaming by the end. I find him absolutely enthralling.

This video sent me into the school library to find a copy of Julius Caesar today. We don't have one, but luckily there are loads of scripts available pdf form online. What we did have is a CliffNotes guide whose introduction talks about persuasion as an important theme in the play, particularly political persuasion.

The play was performed in 1599 when Elizabeth the first was ageing, and had no clear successor, a fact which made the populous nervous. Shakespeare mirrored some of their discontent and some of the scenarios in their minds by evoking 44BC in Rome, when Caesar comes back to Rome after defeating Pompey in Spain, one of Rome's adversaries, and tries to persuade the population to crown him king. He is highly ambitious and sees himself as superior to all other contenders for power. I've only read to scene two, but it seems already as though there could be a timely re-staging of this play around Donald Trump's candidacy.

I want to teach this play! I'm reading the study guide and wanting to have a class to go into tomorrow, to open the scene and talk to the students about the nature of democracy, and how easily a crowd can be swayed. After all, in the scene that Lewis's speech comes from, he speaks to a crowd which has just been hardened against Caesar by Brutus's comments, but by the end of Antony's speech, the crowd is howling for the blood of Caesar's murderers. If public opinion can be so quickly swayed at the hands of a powerful rhetorician, how stable is the democracy really? 

Introduce myself to my cohort (Homework assignment)

(This post is the first homework assignment, which I have to share via a link. The suggested newsletter editor, smore.com, is not functional on Palestinian internet, apparently!)

Very excited

…to teach English Literature to high school students

This is at Maktesh Ramon, a crater a few hours south of Jerusalem.

It is very warm here in Ramallah as I write this. I have all the shades drawn and the fan on, though the air is stubbornly sluggish. I can hardly imagine how this city’s (and many others') residents will withstand the physical stress of 30 such days, without food or, astoundingly, water, starting Tuesday, for Ramadan. 

Last year during Ramadan I was amazed to see how life as usual continued in the city streets. People continued to walk around, taxis peeled around as usual, windows down in the dust, people calling to one another as they bought colourful pickles from street side bins; everything carried on with what seemed to me the same fervor as ever, all without a drop of water to cool the jets between 3:50 am and 7:49 pm. 

My primary source of fascination and education since I’ve been here, however, has not been the city, or Arab or Muslim culture, or even Arabic language (at which I'm still hopeless). I’ve been fascinated by the high school students that I’ve had in class, and the literature we have studied together. Truly, studied together, because I didn’t choose the syllabus, so part of the challenge has been staying ahead of them and figuring out how I want to engage us in the text. 

I’m quite excited about what happens in a classroom when the students create their own meaning around a text. That is not to say that they ignore the story that’s there, but they allow their experience and their context to influence how they understand the text. 

I’ve enjoyed asking students what they think about a text before telling what’s impressive about it; having them create role plays about the themes of the text before reading the story; asking students, when reading drama, what they think will happen next.

On another hike, this one near Ramallah, with Monica, a
very significant teaching mentor for me.

I am drawn to the literature classroom because of its dynamism. I taught two sections of two different courses, and got to see how the composition of the class, as much if not more than the culture of the students, influences a class’s reading of a text. 

Some classes develop affection for certain characters, or follow certain motifs more closely. One class took it in stride when Lady Macbeth is pronounced dead - they seemed to have been expecting it. The other class was completely up in arms and carried on for minutes: “Miss! What? She died? When? How did that happen? She died? MISS!” 

My undergraduate degree is in economics, so literature was a new direction for me (since high school at least), but it’s grabbed me by the back of the neck, and I feel quite infatuated. 

I am curious to see how working with American students is different from working with students for whom English is a second language. I look forward to meeting you all!