Teaching English, the Day After by Sarah Fleming

Teaching English, the Day After

It’s Thursday, January 7th, 2021, the day after the insurrection at the Capitol Building, and for the last seventeen hours, our news feeds have been horrifying. 

This morning, I am opening my classes with a spoken word reading of the poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes. This was not my own idea; as with most good teaching moves, I “borrowed” it from other educators I admire and respect, who posted the idea online in one of the many forums I frequent on social media. (How did we teach before facebook, and twitter, and blogs, and chats? I can barely remember.) Amidst the repeated cries of, “what do we do in class tomorrow?” and “how do we go on like everything is normal?” come the mantras: find solace in the literary word. Give them time and space to think, feel, write, and respond. Stand up and speak out. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Do the work. Don’t make teachers of color bear the brunt of responsibility. Do let students see you take a stand. Don’t be political in your teaching. All teaching is political.

And so on.

I sat on my couch, binge-watched the news, and doom-scrolled through social media. I read the blog post Kylene Beers shared, and I found what I needed: comfort and confidence. And then, I opened a fresh tab and began to construct the slides I’m sharing here with you. 

I said above that I began with the Hughes poem. Well, that’s sort of a lie – I actually began with a quick overview of how the NYS ELA standards work, and how that larger document connects with the unit goals, weekly agendas and daily learning objectives I post. I talked to my students about what it means to have standards, a set of charges for what should happen in an English class, and how, and why. I selected a few to highlight, and I explained that they give us a rationale for what we would be doing today, to ground our work in the greater intention for English language arts, to have classroom experiences that ask for the development of these literacies. I would be lying if I didn’t think I had to do that, in part to provide a rationale for anyone who would choose to argue I was overstepping my bounds. 

I was deliberate in that plan, in part because I always think it’s important for students to know the WHY beyond our WHAT, but also because I needed to reiterate that rationale as a way to mediate my own fear. As I sit here the day after, write and reflect (while my students do so with me, in front of me in my classroom or a tab over in our classroom Meet), I am wound up with anxiety, the frenetic energy that comes with the fear of deviating from the plan, with worrying about whether I’d get called in front of my administration or receive an angry phone call or email. The middle-aged, white woman and former type-A, overachiever, good girl, star student, institutionalized to not want (nor know how) to rock the boat, once again paralyzed with fear and self-censorship, whose silence is ever protected by her privilege.

So we listened to the poem, and then we made time and space to write in our notebooks. For students who may have needed help getting started, I provided these prompts:

What did my 10th and 12th grade students have to say? A lot. Some expressed feeling terror and disbelief in their journals. Others expressed feeling confused or uncomfortable with the strong reactions they saw from their family and friends, on the news, or on social media. Many spoke to what they felt was blatant hypocrisy, at watching what this angry mob of white insurgents was allowed to do, while protestors last spring and summer for the Black Lives Matter movement were met with a much different response. 

Some students continued the conversation with me outside of their journals and class. One student emailed me that night and asked if she could write in her journal that evening while she watched what was going on, because she was “just very frustrated and upset that all of this is happening that I can’t write because my hands are shaking too much and I find writing my feelings out helps me calm down.” 

One student stayed on after the Meet to express appreciation for having the time and space in class to reflect and to approach our conversations with a more deliberate intention of practicing how to be better listeners. He spoke to his position, coming from a more conservative household, but also wanting the opportunity to speak against the overt acts of racism and white supremacy he witnessed, and to be sure he could distinguish between the two. I admit, it was students positioned as such that I had in mind, given that I teach at a small, suburban high school with a fair amount of affluent families.

In addition to giving students time and space to write in their digital notebooks, I also created a space for them to share their thoughts with each other using Padlet, a digital whiteboard. This is where I had to think carefully and reflexively about what I did and how I did it. Usually when I use this tool, I fix the settings so that students’ names appear automatically at the top of the sticky note they post, in part to give them credit and in part to hold them accountable. In my rush to create this board, I forgot to double check this setting, and when we began to work in the padlet, students’ responses were posting as “anonymous.” I had to make a split-second decision – do I change it? They’ve already begun to add to it; are they only doing so because they feel protected by having their name left off? I will say that part of my quick decision-making was also a reflection of the class personalities, our hybrid state during covid, and the difficulties I’ve been having trying to foster verbal conversation with masks.

Over the weekend, a student reached out to me in email to express her concern that hosting the padlet with students’ comments remaining anonymous wasn’t the way to go. She suggested that classmates’ anonymous responses felt more like social media, and that some classmate’s views weren’t being respected or that people were being made to feel uncomfortable. This was what I feared the most, push-back about what we were doing, and whether or not that might be tied to the individuals’ personal politics, or to my own. We engaged in what I felt was a thoughtful exchange, in which I tried to hear her concerns, better articulate my intentions, and model what it means to be a person wrestling with feeling uncomfortable when being challenged. I wondered, what can I do in this moment: to commit to leveraging my white, middle-class, cisgendered privilege and speak in ways that model activist literacies and that serve justice? How can I nurture this exchange and rely upon our working relationship to lay a more effective foundation for growth rather than respond in a way that will only throw up more walls and shut down communication? How can I encourage students to feel able to talk to me, and at the same time help point out that their sense of being uncomfortable, or of feeling alienated in their views, is what members of marginalized communities feel every day, all the time? 

Another student posted on the padlet that if it was difficult to expect adults to have these conversations, could we really expect teenagers to be able to post anonymously and keep it respectful? And that right there, I think, is the crux of this issue. 

Because, yes – I can and do expect young people to be able to do this kind of work, to speak and listen to each other respectfully. But, that doesn’t mean they let themselves or each other off the hook when it gets hard. That doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes or screw up as we do it. In fact, we absolutely will mess it up, and we’ll have to deal with it and own it as we do. 

It occurs to me as I write this, that students who are expressing concern with doing this kind of work in class, or who feel as if their perspectives aren’t being heard, are speaking in terms of the exercise as being about making everyone feel “comfortable.” This is a point I will need to revisit, because at no time did I say, while we need to make space for all members of the class, and for their individual perspectives and experiences, did I equate that with making them all comfortable. Or at least, I thought I hadn’t. In fact, I would argue (and will need to do so again with and for them, obviously) that this work can only be done when we have to sit with being uncomfortable. And that, perhaps, for many of us it’s really the first time we’ve been in such a position as to feel marginalized in a classroom (as opposed to my many BIPOC students who feel.tbis way on a regular basis).

Hermione Granger reminds us: “when in doubt, go to the library.” My doubts haven’t disappeared (in fact, I still have a huge pit in my stomach as I write this); they’ve merely subsided for the moment as I try to move forward and do the next right thing. I challenge my thinking about planning, instruction and assessment with practitioner texts such as Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius and Cornelius Minor’s We Got This. I not only buy and read copies of Ibram Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist and Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More than Survive, I press my admin for planning thorough professional development around these texts rather than just pat myself of the back for having a woke, white book club (remember Tre Johnson’s article in the Washington Post last summer?). I follow the #Disrupttexts movement on social media and I read everything Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena German, Dr. Kimberly Parker and Julia Torres write. And then I read young adult literature, looking for more texts to use as I work to make my classroom and my ELA curriculum more inclusive. I lobby for more funds to purchase new books for classroom use, and I work with other local educators with #ProjectLITComm. 

Coda: one week later.

It’s been a week, and our world is still on fire. The president has been impeached (and suspended from Twitter), over twenty thousand national guard troops are heading to DC for next week’s inauguration, and everyone is afraid.  In addition to our regularly scheduled program, my students have spent the week completing that “Critically Reading the News” assignment as I laid out, and next we will review each other’s examples. We’re discussing the difference between practicing our media literacy and critical literacy. It has been a sufficient response to a week of crisis.

But it’s not enough.

So I leave us with the following questions for reflection, which I’m keeping on a real sticky-note posted on my computer monitor. And I would welcome any additions you might recommend. As I say in class: I’m listening.

• What am I doing today to leverage my power and privilege as an effective co-conspirator?
• How am I making space for all my students, setting norms for an inclusive classroom that challenges subconscious bias, supports critical introspection, and rejects whites supremacy? 
• How am I modeling, with my students and colleagues, how to both call out and call in?
• How am I working to de-center whiteness in my classroom and curriculum?
• How am I practicing active listening?
• Did I “Consult 3 Before Me” today?