Go Where the Students Are
As a teacher of college students, especially freshmen at a county college, it’s easy to become cynical. Too many students come in short of…
As a teacher of college students, especially freshmen at a county college, it’s easy to become cynical. Too many students come in short of the skills necessary for them to succeed, and many assume that it doesn’t really matter.
The cynicism isn’t warranted, however, given that many of these deficiencies have been foist upon them by an educational system micromanaged from Washington by politicians with agendas that have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom. The array of so-called reforms — from “school choice” and charters to No Child Left Behind and the concerted and consistent attacks in the teachers union — are a way of ignoring the longstanding underfunding of our public schools, while funneling money to private interests.
These reforms have done their damage, which leaves those of us teaching freshmen with a more difficult assignment — especially as more and more students for whom English is a second language are entering college. As I said, it is easy to allow the frustrations to overwhelm us and for teachers to become cynical. I know many who’ve become just that. But cynicism does nothing but excuse bad teaching, ignoring what the students bring to class and preventing us from experimenting. The goal, I think, should be to go where the students are and to encourage them to follow us to more challenging places. Many will refuse, but more will become engaged and, even if their writing fails to reach he levels we seek, their minds will expand, and they will become both more open and more focused, enter able to construct a functional and legitimate argument and less susceptible to the kinds of entreaties that rely on ignorance.
To that end, I assigned what I hoped would be an interesting journal exercise, hoping to have my students engage the issue of race through the lens of popular culture. The focus of the first two units this semester is on race. For the first, they were asked to read two essays — Brent Staples’ “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders” and Ralph Ellison’s “On Being the Target of Discrimination” — and write response papers. The essays are about discrimination and stereotyping, with the Staples’ piece, which first ran in Ms. Magazine in the mid-1980s, offering a viewpoint that I bought might be recognizable in the era of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Staples writes about “mistaken identity,” i.e., he way in which he — a 6-foot, 2-inch black man with an Afro — is often stereotyped. People cross the street, especially at night, he faces problems in stores, and even the receptionist at his workplace mistakes the young reporter for something he is not. He has a power, he says, to reshape the public space, a power that can be life-threatening — as the experience, 30 years later, of Martin, Brown, et al made very clear.
In preparation for their second, multi-source paper and, as a segue between the two units, I asked them to pick one of nine songs and compare their themes and details to the essay they wrote their paper on.the goal was for them to seek out connections, to force them to see the pop culture they live with as possible sourcing, and to make the entire enterprise a little more enjoyable.
The songs covered multiple genres:
Run the Jewels, “Early”
Vic Mensa, “16 Shots”
Bruce Springsteen, “American Skin ( 41 Shots)”
Drive-By Truckers, “What it Means”
Garland Jeffreys, “Colored Boy Said”
Common, “Black America Again”
J. Cole, “Neighbors”
John Mellencamp, “Easy Target”
Talib Kweli, “Which Side Are You On”
The J. Cole song, about his experiences as a black man in a rich, white neighborhood, was the most written about, but they also chose others. The responses were dead on. They saw the connections between the essay and the song they chose and were able to identify specific points in the lyrics that stood out. We will be discussing the connections in class on Monday and Tuesday, before I ask them to take some speeches and essays by Martin Luther King Jr. and consider King against the backdrop of their own expectations.
What I think this shows is that students will respond if given something they can relate to. They want to engage with the world, ask questions, analyze, and comment. Given them a chance and they will surprise us — and teach us something in the process.