Well, the condom came off the class. No safe teaching in one class
Friday. But,
it was a "wow" class. I'll just say that I had to put aside the planned
beginning of a
project presentation and let spontaneity kick in when a student asked a
question at the
beginning of the class about what was to her a critical "personal" situation in
another
class. All hell broke loose before I could open my mouth. Hands shot up,
people called
out, cliques of whispering side conversations began. I did more sitting back
at watching
and listening than participating and guiding. It was a cacophony of total and
partial
agreement and disagreement: African-Americans agreeing and disagreeing with
each other;
African-American ladies agreeing and disagreeing with non-African-American
ladies; ladies
agreeing and disagreeing with guys; African-American guys disagreeing with the
non-African-American ladies; self-proclaimed liberals agreeing and disagreeing
with
self-proclaimed conservatives. I won't belabor the point. No bloc voting or
lock-stepping unanimity anywhere at anytime among anyone on any part of the
issue.
Everyone seemed to be that proverbial variation on a theme and exception to the
rule. All
weekend I thought about that discussion and the cacophony of responses in
journals to it
that cut across any lines anyone could draw: liked, disliked, excited, bored,
asserting,
questioning, interested, insightful, stunned, "no big deal," "what a class,"
"could care
less," "that was an important class," "see no point." I was particularly
sensitive to
what had occurred because of a brief discussion of "traditional" versus "real"
diversity
that I and my good friend, Todd Zakrajsek have been having on and off since
Lilly South..
This is what I came up with about that spur-of-the moment fifty minutes as I
hit the
streets this pre-dawn morning.
First it was the philosophers; now it's the scientists. They tell us
that human
beings are social animals, that we're hotwired to connect. We have a natural
desire for
attachment. We instinctively feel and are affected, and sometimes mimic, even
to a small
extent, the mood, manners, and actions of the people around us. The result is
that most
people are pretty nice when they go eyeball-to-eyeball, one-on-one with each
other, when
they know each other's names, when their faces are clearly seen, when they rip
out labels,
when they step out from being boxed in and separated by stereotypes to relate
personally
person to person, when they experience the joy of being in each other's
presence.
But, what is so often ignored on our campuses is that none of this
applies when
the natural individual heterogeneity is replace by an artificial homogeneity,
when people
become impersonal, when they relate to herded into corrals of generalities,
when labels
are slapped over and hide their names and faces, when the are converted into
numbers, when
they are bureaucratically identified as "units," when their uniqueness is torn
from their
souls, when their spirit is amputated, when their blood is suck out from them,
when they
are de-boned into stick figures. Its as if the operation of an entirely
different part
of the brain kicks in and triggers a different set of values. People become
different
people to each other. Warmth, love, awareness, caring, support, encouragement,
joy,
empathy, respect, sensitivity, closeness, and nurturing--those things that make
life in
the classroom worth living--are replaced by weeding out, coldness,
insensitivity,
distance, unawareness, indifference, and, as I teach in the Holocaust course,
worse.
The result is that so many of us profs get student behavior so wrong;
they step
away from and don't reflect on or think about or don't get involved with the
world of
emotion, social relationships, personal lives, motives, morality, expectations,
imagination, faith, and love; they surrender humanity and reality to
statistics, charts,
diagrams, as well as to distorting assumption and presumption; they drop their
guard--if
they ever had it up--against treating students as a consistent, constant
homogenous group
or collage of groups. Consequently, they commit a host of "attribution
errors." That's
why when it comes to "students" and what I call "traditional diversities" we
have to find
ways to replace mathematics with humanity, break down fences, destroy boxes,
cast aside
stereotype and generalities, and get beyond labels. After all, to be
realistic, teaching
is about the unique individual, whom I call "the real diversity." That in
itself makes
teaching an art fraught with impromptu, messiness, inconvenience, discomfort,
and
uncertainty rather than a science directed by neat, structured, and guaranteed
predictability.
To all my Jewish friends, Susie and I wish you a very happy Passover.
And, to all
our Christian friends, we wish you a happy Easter.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History
http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\__/\ \/\
/ \/ \_ \/ / \/
/\/
\ /\
//\/\/ /\
\__/__/_/\_\ \_/__\
/\"If you want to climb
mountains,\ /\
_ / \ don't practice on mole
hills" -
---
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