The Deep End

I'm in over my head and loving it.

We just finished our second week (first full week with students) of school, and until yesterday, I was afraid it would come to an end without something for me to reflect on. Providence, however, has determined otherwise.

My Multicultural Lit class is into its unit on African American literature. After much consideration on where to start with the reading material, I consulted my inner Julie Andrews and decided on "the beginning" which--in my eyes--is the slave narrative. As a reader and learner, I understand things best in linear form. Naturally, I figured my teaching and planning ought to fall into the same alignment...

...and it bombed.

We started with sections of Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative and then moved quickly to part of Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" I frontloaded the readings with historical context and biographical information on the authors, and I made hard copies of the texts, encouraging the class of seven to highlight, annotate, question, and be prepared to discuss "anything striking to you guys." I was ready to dive into the deep end, but I realize that the students were not. I was pulling them in with me without giving them water wings. Our class discussions of these pieces consisted almost entirely of me interjecting ideas into awkward silence, and I was soon forced to admit that even when the talented and typically strong students (which is basically this entire group) are quiet, then something is wrong on my end, not theirs.

I was wallowing in the failure of these class periods Wednesday night while I was preparing my notes on Charles W. Chestnutt's "The Wife of His Youth." I threw them in the deep end, I thought. I know how to swim here, but they don't. They need a life preserver. They need something they can attach themselves to so that they can navigate these waters. As I looked back through the short story, I thought about what modern and more recent issues I could use as water wings for the students. It was about halfway through my second skimming through that I started paying closer attention to how the story keeps coming back to the ideas of "blackness" and "whiteness," what the two terms seem to consist of, and how each is valued or devalued. I posed these questions:

• What goes into our conceptualization of "blackness" and "whiteness"?
• Can you ever completely take race out of the equation?
• Does race function like a big inside joke wherein you can only claim certain elements or authority if you're on the inside? And if so, how do you get on the inside? Or can the inside only be inherited?

During Thursday's discussion, their interest was resurfacing, and they were reaching for a life preserver. I ended the period saying, "Your homework tonight has two parts to it. 1) Google the name 'Rachel Dolezal.' 2) Develop an opinion on her." I'm not going to go into an explanation of who Rachel Dolezal is here in my blog. If the reader is unfamiliar with the name, I would encourage you to follow the same homework assignment my students did. Not only did it spur a lively discussion in class today, but it helped them make genuine connections to the text we discussed the day before. They brought up points about racial genuineness, claiming authority within a certain racial identity, and efforts to externalize blackness and whiteness. (Okay, those are my fancy words that I'm using now, but I promise the heart of the discussion was the same.) What pleased and surprised me most was that the more they talked, the more they began to draw parallels between what they crash-course learned about Dolezal and what they previously read about Chestnutt's main character, Mr. Ryder. The difference in the group's energy was like night and day or...if I may...black and white.

I learned and relearned three major things this week:

• The deep end is deep for many reasons: lack of experience, lack of interest, lack of knowledge, etc.
• Our plans mustn't always follow a clear straight line. The curvy roads are more fun anyway.
• I'm asking questions of the students without having fully-formed ideas on these topics myself. My thoughts and opinions are continuously developing and being refined along with theirs. However, just because I don't have all the answers doesn't mean their learning experience will be any less genuine.

It's been an exhausting second week of school--perhaps the most tiresome second week I've ever had. I've got my head above water, and this additional task of keeping seven learners afloat with me continues to energize and inform my teaching practice. With enough power, hopefully we'll all keep swimming.