Some ask me about teaching college as if I’m a spy, which I often feel as though I am, and not just in the classroom. Others would rather avoid the subject (college, teaching, politics) entirely. Teaching is an interesting thermometer…with which to take the temperature of…the nation? I might think so, at times, but I’m probably just observing my particular students in my particular classes in relationship to the specific ideas on the day’s agenda. I don’t know what exactly it’s possible to extrapolate from this group: it feels like the fabric of society is generally a frayed, tangled mess. There are too many simultaneous realities to create one coherent narrative called “college.”
My classroom is the container. I’m the constant. The variables are the students themselves and the ways they respond to the circumstances of their lives; to illness, chaotic disruption, and chronic instability. In my classroom I notice things as I imagine an anthropologist would.
Time is an essential component: I would have a different perspective on the shifts I’ve witnessed in the past 5 years (the beginning of the pandemic) if I hadn’t already been teaching for the previous 22. I started teaching before I graduated high school. My first teaching job was in Window Rock, AZ, where I taught summer classes for elementary-aged Navajo kids. I was given a big white plastic curriculum binder, which I immediately decided was irrelevant, and improvised the entire thing. I just wanted them to have fun. We played games and drew. I remember throwing a red rubber ball outside in the dusty summer heat as prairie dogs popped out of their holes to watch us. Those kids were so sweet and I still think about them all the time. One 4th grader named Jeremiah LOVED Lisa Frank so much, more than anyone I had ever met. It was also my first awakening to the lived experience of native Americans, and the death of the cartoonish myths and ritualized fictions into which I’d been indoctrinated in my Pennsylvania public school.
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