bell hooks, ways of knowing, and being a white teacher

bell hooks reflects, in one of her essays in Teaching to Transgress, that if she had been able to take classes on critical race theory from progressive black professors rather than her progressive white professors, she would have, because those teachers, by dint of being black, would deliver the information differently because of the "spirit that orders the words" when they speak. There is a legitimacy, of course, that comes from being a minority, which changes the way students perceive content that is delivered to them. 

I feel my own lack of legitimacy in this area as a white teacher when we consider thoughtful texts by black authors in my class. Yesterday we discussed Audre Lorde's "Poetry is Not a Luxury" and even though she speaks of women, not of black women or white women, I felt a certain gulf between myself and my students as I spoke with them about how Lorde exhorts us: 

"We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage." 


A white teacher telling the students that we need to encourage each other feels a bit empty, frankly. I just imagine what these black students would feel if it were a black woman, or a black man, or a fellow refugee, speaking to them about the need to encourage each other. Of course I encourage them daily, but it's within a fairly proscribed academic context. I encourage them about their jobs and their sports pursuits, but I cannot pretend that we are really part of the same community, and they know it. 

What I felt very passionately, though I did not make this distinction in more than one class, is that as students they need to encourage each other. As friends, they need to encourage each other to look within, to face their fears, to "bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within in," so we can "learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living," which causes "those fears which rule our lives and form our silences [to] begin to lose their meaning."

hooks talks about the importance of individual experience in the classroom as a legitimate way of knowing, especially the experience of oppressed groups, like women and minorities. I feel much better about my ability to create a space in the classroom for the sharing of this kind of experience, as a white female teacher. Still, listening to her makes me want to be a principal just so I can search out and hire teachers of color, which our system so desperately needs. 

Yesterday many of the young women in my class (and many men as well, in fact) knocked my socks off with their comments about the essay. Only maybe 30-40% of the students in each class spoke during our 15-20 minute circle discussion, but the things that were shared were thoughtful and, I trust, impacted the thinking of everyone in the room. 

In perhaps my favorite moment all day, MN asked, "Miss, what does she mean by 'poetry is the skeleton architecture of our lives'?" I was unsure what to say, because indeed that phrase flummoxed me each of the half dozen times I read and annotated this essay in preparation for class. Luckily, MA jumped in with a response before I even could pose the question to the class - and she very rarely does that! She said "It means it's the most important thing. It's the thing that all our other action depends on." I was astounded by the ease and clarity of her interpretation. Of course, that makes perfect sense and is a powerful vision of poetry, and totally in line with Lorde's thrust in this essay, that poetry is not a luxury. Neither, I said to the class, is our literal skeleton a luxury - "We would fall down without it" mused SH. MN jumped onto MA's comment - "Ah, so she's saying we need to look inside ourselves to find it!" Again, this deepened my own understanding of Lorde's concept of poetry as skeleton.


In the first period, the conversation focused on fear and the ways it keeps us silent. Lorde's comment about how fears keep us silent and that, by putting them under "scrutiny" we can begin to be free of them, spurred a conversation of what kinds of fears make us silent. 
Fear of actually facing violence, said ZE.
Fear of facing incarceration if we are guilty, said DI.
Fear of people's reactions if we tell them we are sick, like if we have HIV, said AM.
Fear of being abused, or of telling someone that we've been abused, said MY.
Fear of angry parents if we tell them that we are in a relationship, said AA.  

Before we read Lorde's words about encouraging each other, I asked students how we overcome these fears. They said "raise your voice; be confident" and I said that those things are hard. How do we gain the confidence to raise our voice? Practice, they said, and encourage each other. This is exactly what Lorde tells us, I said. We looked at the section where Lorde says that "We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where the language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it." 

We had just written poetry at the beginning of class, a stanza of lines all of which began with "I". When we reached this point in the discussion, we could say "That was training. Lorde would congratulate us here on doing the hard work of looking within and asking 'What and who am I?'" We then talked, in both first and second periods, about what that takes courage. Why is it hard to turn the spotlight towards ourselves? 
Because sometimes we've made mistakes and done things we don't want to look at, said MN.
Because we like to put the past in the past, and pretend it has no power, said ZA.

_________

At the beginning of the period, as I told the classes that their homework was to read two poems by Langston Hughes, I said that it was his poetry was caused me to like poetry. "I didn't like any of the poetry we read in high school," I told them, to which RA said "Me neither!" I thought this was great, I always love the candor of what RA says. So I said "I'm so glad you said that, because it reminds me to say to you, even if you don't like any of the poetry we are reading now, don't give up on poetry, because there are a million kinds, and you might connect really well to some other kind of poetry. Don't do what I did, which is graduate thinking 'aw, poetry is just not for me.'"

I was going to make a comparison to what people have told me about beer - "you just haven't found the right one yet!" But I didn't. 

I've been thinking what kind of academic writing I could do about what goes on in my classroom, and I feel like reflecting on being a white teacher in a classroom of African and Asian and South American students might be fruitful line of inquiry to pursue.

Life as a lesson block

I have taken to thinking of my days as lessons. In the classroom, each lesson begins with reading. When I have the lesson properly planned out, it ends with writing of some kind. Reading and writing bookend the more active and interactive work that goes on.

Part of me thinks, if this is a beneficial structure for class, why not adopt it in life? And indeed I do write in the mornings, and read at night. On weekends, I am lucky enough to be able to read and write in the mornings, and read and write at nights. It's the life.

The other aspect of lessons is that, after something large or substantive, like a hands-on activity, video making, discussion, or video viewing, I think it's important to allow students to write down their thoughts, as a way of processing what they've just experienced.

I want to practice that practice right now, after having finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I liked the ending. An academic conference in the future, at which two professors discuss their research into the authenticity of the document known to the audience as The Handmaid's Tale. How easily all our troubles and dramas will be glossed by a future academic conference. The intensity of my emotion, the realness of my experience, cannot hope to be re-felt, re-captured, by future generations, caught up as they will be in their own time and narratives.

The most horrifying part of the book seemed to be that old women are sent to the "colonies" to clean up toxic waste, offered no protection, and so die after a short time on the job. This injustice against older women revealed to me how strongly I respect and admire women of that age. I am much angrier at the injustices against them than against the Wives and Handmaids and Marthas.

Margaret Atwood

The book also says interesting things about covert activity, and how human nature will not be contained. Everyone in the story has something that he or she is hiding, and even though the consequences are dire, they do the hidden activity anyway. Life along the oh-so straight and narrow just isn't really an option, it seems. And some of us will die for the risks we take to experience just a little bit of life.

Atwood says in an essay in the New York Times that she leaves the narrator unnamed because so many people have passed through history, storytellers who have left us their tales, unnamed and unacknowledged. They have been heroes, and we will never know who they are. Most of them, in fact, their stories will never be told. Offred was one of them. We are the lucky audience of readers, one day to become writers, who benefit from the fact that they, who like Offred maybe didn't want to tell their stories, did.

Women

Women's voices have dominated my brain waves this week
1. bell hooks
2. Audre Lorde
3. Students in discussion 

bell hooks

1. When I was in graduate school at Earlham, my two program coordinators, Becky and Randy, told us one winter afternoon, that we should all ask our mentor teachers to be excused from teaching class on a certain Wednesday in the near future, because bell hooks was speaking on Earlham's campus and this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I had never heard of bell hooks, but I took their word for it and skidaddled after third period tenth grade to Earlham's auditorium. 
Tangent to say that being a sola audience member has enormous benefits, including a) getting unbelievably good seats at the last minute, because there are always awkward seats between parties left in the good seating sections; b) getting to read unapologetically during intermission because no one expects you to be social; c) never worrying whether your companion is enjoying the show, and d) if you are not enjoying the show, leaving at the interval with no explanations to make or embarrassed negotiations to endure. 

I enjoyed benefit a) on the day of bell hooks' speech, because when I arrived they said there was no room left in the auditorium. However, from the doorway I could see that there was a seat in the very first row that someone had heaved a backpack into. I strode quickly down the aisle and asked the person to move it (hooks was already speaking) and I sat in the best seat in the house, looking straight up into her face, for the rest of the talk. 

What struck me most about her was that she did not apologize or try to conform at all. She said unpopular things (as well as popular ones) she was openly critical of some people, even people close to her (why is it that women can never do this?) and she was funny, in ways that strained decorum. 

2. An apparent indifference to the pressure of social norms is also a trademark of Audre Lorde's work and words. When I was in graduate school at Bread Loaf (graduate school really did its job, in the off hours!) a fellow student mentioned a memorably-named essay, "Poetry is not a luxury" by a memorably named poet, Audre Lorde. This week I read it and assigned it to my students for weekend homework. Lorde says that poetry is the language we use to imagine realities different from our current reality, and it is through uttering these words that we begin to bring the next, improved reality into existence. 

I listened to a talk she gave in 1990 at UCLA. She said that when she acknowledged her position in the communities of a) black Women, and b) lesbian women, she was placing herself so far out of the mainstream that she noticed a new disregard for how others perceived her. If she was so clearly not part of the "normal" crowd, then she didn't have to work so hard to appear to be "normal". 

Audre Lorde

This self-produced sense of freedom really struck me. I wonder if I, too, could decide "Well, I'm not like most of those folks, so let me lean into that and stop trying to seem like most of those folks, or trying to be good at what they want me to be good at, or look the way they want me to look." It seems so tantalizing. 
Today I watched Litany to Survival, a documentary about Lorde's life and work. She so boldly embodies the challenges that she put to the establishment, but she is also so warm and human that it is impossible to be offended. One can only look inward and consider how I might better myself along the lines she has identified as unjust. 

3. Friday's class involved a circle discussion of the poem "Ways of Talking" by Ha Jin. Here it is. 

Students said things which had me beaming, nodding, nearly falling out of my chair at the insight and thoughtfulness of their comments. I think they said some of the most profound things they've said all year, including their knock-your-socks-off comments about key parts of Othello. I will not try to recreate their ideas here, but take your own stab at thinking about what is going on for the "we" speaking in this poem.

Ways of Talking

BY HA JIN

We used to like talking about grief

Our journals and letters were packed

with losses, complaints, and sorrows.

Even if there was no grief

we wouldn’t stop lamenting

as though longing for the charm

of a distressed face.

Then we couldn’t help expressing grief

So many things descended without warning:

labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone,

marriages broken, friends estranged,

ambitions worn away by immediate needs.

Words lined up in our throats

for a good whining.

Grief seemed like an endless river—

the only immortal flow of life.

After losing a land and then giving up a tongue,

we stopped talking of grief

Smiles began to brighten our faces.

We laugh a lot, at our own mess.

Things become beautiful,

even hailstones in the strawberry fields.

Meeting Friends Late In Life

A rooster on Ramona St.
in Portland, OR

Despite the appearance of the words Meeting and Friends in the title, this post is not about Quakerism.  

Yesterday in the book Stoner, by John Williams, the main character, who is a university professor of English, meets a new colleague and hopes to become friends with him.

"It was some time before Stoner recognized the source of his attraction to Lomax. In Lomax's arrogance, his fluency, and his cheerful bitterness, Stoner saw, distorted but recognizable, an image of his friend David Masters. He wished to talk to him as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him."

Why should it have to be impossible? I too am saddened by the idea that friendships which start later in life are doomed to remain shallow. I marked this passage in the book before I read the following passage this morning in an essay, published originally in 1975, about a friendship with WH Auden:

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. 

I think both Hannah Arendt (the author of the essay on Auden) and Stoner present outdated and unnecessarily limiting points of view on friendship. 
What if the friends are not the same age? If one is older, are they limited by the perceived length of that person's time on earth?
Why not go into friendship assuming that this connection will be deep and fulfilling, and see what happens? 

When I was in college I read this quote: 

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

read This "parallelism of life" seems to be the key to friendship to me, not any requirement of age or length of time being friends. If I share current pursuits with another, regardless of the difference in our ages or the different paths we have trod until this moment, there is rich potential for friendship. 

The "community of thought" seems to say that we need to be thinking about some of the same things, so we have things to talk about and reflect on. Again, this does not require similar age or deep history. I don't know what he means by "a rivalry of aim". That we are seeking ends that are in competition with one another? I confess I do not see how that contributes to friendship. 

Except that with teacher friends, there is always a healthy nugget of comparison and competition when we talk about what's going on in our conversations, which I think productively goads each of us toward better expression of our ideas and better practice in the classroom. That rivalry adds a forward motion to the friendship which I feel is worth quite a lot. 

Two "Off-the-boat" stories

I have been brought to tears twice in the past two days by stories of immigrants newly arrived in America. But these are not the oft-published stories of grand injustices like the tearing apart of families or the withholding of housing, jobs, or rights in court. 

The first comes from Paper Daughter, by M. Elaine Mar. Five-year-old Yee arrives in Denver with her mother, following after her father who departed from China years before. Nixon is in office, we learn for a sense of timing, and Yee joins an all-white first grade classroom. 

The trials of school are almost incommunicable but Mar poignantly and impressively details the difficulty of answering a question in math class: 


Mrs. Tate wrote the equation in big chalk figures on the board. She asked for a volunteer. The more enthusiastic students raised their hands. Mrs. Tate scanned the room, then decided, "Let's give Elaine a chance." I didn't understand a word, not even my new name. There was silence. "Elaine?" Mrs. Tate repeated. I ddin't respond. "That's your name," San reminded me. My classmates started giggling. "Oh," I said. I immediately knew the answer, but I couldn't think of the word for "seven" in English. "Um," I said. The children laughed some more.

Mrs. Tate made a shushing sound, one finger in front of her lips. She drew tally marks next to the numbers. "Now, here we have one, two, three," she said. "And here we have one, two three, four. If we put them together, how many do we have?" She looked at me significantly.

I still couldn't think of the word. I wanted to ask San, but I wasn't allowed - Mrs. Tate would think I was cheating. I'll write it on the board, I thought. I slid out of my seat.

Misunderstanding my action, Mrs. Tate said, "No, no, you can't go to the bathrom now." The class exploded with laughter. San translated the sentence for me. "I want to write the answer," I told him. 

Too late. Mrs. Tate decided to solve the problem herself: "All together class, one, two, three --" she tapped at the lines she'd drawn "--four, five, six, seven. The answer's seven!"



As I read this I think of students who don't respond right away when their names are called - students who have read the text and probably have understood, but who can't speak their words. This is why I so rarely cold call. But I am afraid that I must often not give students enough time to respond to a question that just takes them time to translate in their heads, then translate back into English. 

This isn't the scene that made me cry - that was the scene when the whole class submits forms and money to buy school-logo tee-shirts which Elaine's family cannot afford. Her shame, instead of her lack of English, prevent her from being clear about why she can't submit the form on time. This kind of shame must be the experience of so many kids, immigrant and not. 

“You may have ‘The Lives of the Poets’ under your oxter, but you don’t have them in your head, so go home and read.”

The other immigrant story is this excerpt from 'Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt. The excerpt appeared in the New Yorker in 1999 and has been reprinted this week. At first I thought it was just going to be an enjoyable and light read. But the final scene, which is indeed funny, and describes his mishaps in a New York movie theater a few days after he's arrived from Ireland, is also very sad. The pain of having an expectation of how you will enjoy simple pleasures, and having that expectation so utterly smashed, is hard to read about. OK I didn't actually cry, but I felt like crying, and certainly had I been in his shoes I think I would have cried.

Reflection of one culture in another

This morning I started reading a memoir called Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar. This is not the first account by a Chinese of her upbringing in China which has enthralled me from the first sentence. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club cast a similar trance with stories of an unabashedly autocratic parenting system which teaches young girls to be obedient, helpful, demure and feminine.

I love the contrast between the parents' stifling tactics and the child's natural impulses, or the ways the child misconstrues some of the parents' carefully conveyed messages, as when the narrator's mother tells her that her grandmother doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else only because she's old and has earned privileges.

"Oh yes," the mother says solemnly, "You must respect your elders." The young girl does respect her grandmother immensely, but only because she's allowed to go about without combing her hair. The girl hates her daily appointment with her mother's comb, and longs for such freedom from tyranny to be her right.

Or when the child understands things the parents never attempted to teach, lessons learned through experience and observation. For example, Ms. Mar learns from watching her mother and their female neighbor give each other false compliments to fulfil a social expectation of flattery alongside self-deprecation. Her mother coos at the young child of their neighbor, and the neighbor says

"'Isn't auntie kind! Oh see how much she likes you!'
Moy-moy, who was two, tottered off to fetch her chamberpot for me, prompting laughter from the two mothers. 'See how much she likes you, little Yee?' they asked. Perched on the rim of Moy-moy's toilet, I began to understand the meaning of subservience, a proxy for affection in our culture."

There are aspects of Ms. Mar's childhood which recall significant moments of my own. She recalls that her mother told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf every single day. I remember the first time my mother told me that story, and how profoundly that message hit home. The narrator of Paper Daughter says that she shivered when the boy died at the end, eaten by the wolf because of his own foolishness. I think my version was the sanitized American translation, in which only the lives of a few hapless sheep are sacrificed to the moral of the story. But the effect was strong. I think my mother told me that story only once, and she did not follow it with the narrator's mother's daily commentary: "You must never lie."

Yesterday, our second day on Beowulf in the 11/12 classroom, students wrote at the beginning of class about what people in their culture tend to talk about when they get together. The natural division that arose in first period and was maintained in the rest of the day was the generational gap - they students wanted to divide the conversation topics into what Older people talk about, and what Younger people talk about. After they discussed with their partners, we took feedback as a class, which resulted in these lists.

                







Then, we read the opening segments of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Our question was, what do these people seem to care about? What do they talk about? Several of the same things came up - leaders, how to be "good," how to achieve power and wealth, former struggles, community problems.

I need to find a way to post our conversation topics in the class, so we can keep an eye to what these people are talking about that we also talk about.

Doing things by hand

This morning I am procrastinating while in my own classroom - a rare occurrence, I assure you - as I read from some of my preferred periodicals, before students roam and rouse the halls. 

THe task I am putting off is glueing bits of text to larger pieces of paper that students can annotate on. My reading brought me to two articles about the virtues of doing things by hand, or making work original. Both articles subtly point me towards my work...

The first is about quick replies to emails that gmail now supplies. "Sounds great!" "I'm in!" "Tuesday works for me." I detest these suggestions and even if I would have said what was written, I adjust my wording on principle. It takes us another step away from writing letters, which I cling to as a source of personal fulfillment. 

The other is about making things with your hands, or craftsmanship. Yesterday an English teaching colleague and I test-drove a reading skills test that we have to administer to all our students next week. It's terrible, in part because it's on the computer, which seems like such an unnatural way to read if any pleasure will be gained. (It feels infinitely different from a kindle. Somehow, I don't want to be able to click on and interact with the reading page - I just want to read it.)

So here's to a day of creating hands-on tasks for students, and a weekend of writing, by hand, Christmas greetings on cards that Tess and I stamped and painted ourselves!