The Academy’s Bench Warmer

I’ve been doing my level best* to confine my teaching–including prep work, etc.–to Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving M/W/F for dissertation.  But I keep falling behind, and this week I had to stay up late on Monday and get up early on Tuesday to grade and prep lectures.  Predictably, classes yesterday went poorly.  Fine; we’re allowed bad days, I say.  I’m more concerned that I was a truly grumpy and unpleasant bastard from Monday night through Tuesday.  The students, fortunately, didn’t bear the brunt of it.  My spouse, unfortunately, did.  Turns out I’ve developed an impossible need for absolute silence when I work, and it becomes even more exacerbated when I’m under the gun.  My spouse having the audacity to breathe or offer me a glass of water–well, that was simply unacceptable, and I delivered a few sharp and extremely ill-advised remarks.  Ugh.  Apologies galore, and my spouse forgave and understood, proving once again that I am the junior partner in the relationship.

Lessons learned?  Get my shit done during the day, especially if it’s due tomorrow.  If I’m going to work in the evening, choose stuff that’s not time-sensitive–reading a book for my dissertation is fine, but grading papers that need to be returned tomorrow is not.  And if that means that I need to do teaching prep during part of a dissertation day, so be it.

* I love that phrase.  It ranks right up there with “I don’t give a flying fuck.”  Which, of course, I shouldn’t say.  Dirty, dirty words.

After reviewing some of the suggestions for readings in post-1865 African-American history and looking through a few syllabi, I’ve come up with a tentative reading list and schedule.  Thoughts and critiques are most welcome and desperately needed….

Week 1: Intro to class.  Students write short essay on how they have experienced race.  Discuss concept of race as construct, etc.

Weeks 2-3: Reconstruction and survey.  Reading: Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

Week 4: Lynching.  Reading: something from Ida B. Wells-Barnett.  Students will also reflect on photos of lynching from Without Sanctuary.

Week 5: Turn-of-the-century strategy.  Reading: DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, combined with an essay by Booker T. Washington.

Weeks 6-7: Living in or Leaving the South.  Reading: All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw.  Video: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration

Weeks 8-9: The Civil Rights Movement in the South, in the North, and close to home.  Readings: case-study essays on civil rights activism in three different locations (trying to give students connection) and a critical assessment of the movement.

Weeks 10-11: Black Power and the Black Panthers.  Reading: Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.

Weeks 12-13: Black culture, black politics, black society: blacksploitation, R&B/Soul/Hip-Hop/Rap, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, Rodney King.  Readings: dunno yet.  Essays, but I’m not sure what.

Weeks 14-15: Post-Racial America [italicized, loaded question mark].  Reading: Obama’s Dreams From My Father

I have the opportunity this fall to teach African American history, post-1865.  By all rights, ZZ should be teaching this course, but he’s not in the neighborhood, so I get a crack at it.  It’s a small class–8-10 students–of juniors/seniors, so we should be able to do some interesting in-depth readings and discussions.  But I’ll admit that I’m in unknown waters, and I’d like to get your help.  Below is a list of books recommended to me by a good friend and, I should say, a respected scholar of African-American history.  How about you?  Suggestions for readings, syllabi you like, etc.?  I’m particularly interested in including something from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., given the fortunate teaching moment provided by his unfortunate arrest for the crime of living in his own house…

Possible books for African-American History Post-1865:
Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind
James Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
some Washington / du Bois showdown
James Grossman, Land of Hope
All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
Ida B. Wells Barnett, Southern Horrors
Litwack and Allen, eds., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty
Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North
Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story
David Hilliard, This Side of Glory
Flores Forbes, Will You Die With Me?
Carol Horton, Race the Making of American Liberalism
Obama, Dreams From My Father

The student from my earlier post follows up:

Thank you very much Professor and I totally understand and believe I do
deserve the grade I recieve the grade I got, and do understand abou
ttreatign all your students equally. I am taking your next history corse
and have a mind set of shooting for a higher grade already. Thank you
again for everything!

Other than the poor grammar, punctuation, and spelling (maybe the student was on a Blackberry…), this made me feel pretty damn okay.  Of course, this means I’ll probably be faced with a similar situation with this student come the end of this term, but that’s weeks away, right?

A New Year greeting from a student:

Hi professor,
I was wondering what I received on the final essay, and how close I was to
receiving a C+ in your class. I am .7 away from reaching my scholarship
and was wondering by any chance if you could round my grade or if I can do
any extra credit of some sort to raise my grade. If there is anything I
can do please let me know.

Not sure what to do with this.  First: the student’s not even close to a C+, sitting with a final grade of 74%, after having missed one quiz, bombed most of the rest, and done poorly on the final (a take-home essay, no less).  In short: the student earned a C, not a C+.  I’m inclined to tell the student that, and comfort myself in having upheld the standards that we value so dearly.

But.  (A) Do I really want this student to not get the scholarship?  and (B) As a “Visiting Full-Time Instructor” (read: temp), do I really give a shit?  Is it worth the time, energy, grief, and potentially bad press at the  non-research, student-oriented institution where I am now teaching and hope to get another gig next year?

Internets, I call on thee for wisdom!

Stay with me: I’m going to go from Radiohead videos to Powerpoint presentations in three paragraphs or less.

Listening to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song,” I can’t help but think of the song’s video, which, as I recall, is basically a cartoon man swimming to the bottom of the ocean to watch television.  You know, typical Radiohead melancholy/forbodding/end of the world stuff.  But here’s the thing: I’ve seen the video just one time, and that was seven years ago when the record came out.  But that video is burned into my head, just like the video for “Creep” or any other damned video I’ve ever seen.

This is why I don’t like videos or soundtracks: because the audio-video connection, once made, doesn’t ever seem to dissolve.   And I don’t like it.  The beauty of music, to me, is its meaning to the individual (especially something as indecipherable as Radiohead’s post-OK Computer work).  I hear a tune, and have my own picture of what it “looks like,” and that look is important to the relevance of that tune to my life.  The band made the song, but I made it into something important to me.  Maybe Thom Yorke wants me to think of a cartoon man at the bottom of the sea when I hear “Pyramid Song,” but he has just robbed me of the opportunity of relating that song more directly to my own world.

And maybe the same thing is true of text and image when we present it as historians.  Let’s say I do as my students command and have a visual presentation for every lecture.  I throw up an image of sharecroppers while talking about Reconstruction.  And maybe, probably, that helps students understand what I’m trying to say, what I’m trying to get across.  But maybe I’ve also just prevented students from exploring the various meanings of Reconstruction in American history.  Maybe I’ve short-circuited part of their brain that would have though more deeply about Reconstruction.  I’ve burned a particular image of Reconstruction in their brains, and it won’t go away.

Or maybe I’m just too lazy to prepare visual presentations.  In any case, the image/sound/text connection is strong, and I wonder if we take seriously enough its power.

p.s. Pyramid Song = dark, amazing beauty that makes me glad to be alive while also wondering about death.  Plus that wicked off-tempo piano.  Genius.

Today, I gave a truly great lecture on the first half of the Civil War.  At least, I thought it was pretty great.  But judging from the students’ faces (oh,  how I wish I could have a camera catching each look of confusion!), the lecture wasn’t anything special.  Same sighs of boredom, same crossed-arms-instead-of-note-taking (what the hell is that about?  Do you know this already?  Am I boring you?  Then get the fuck out!), same packing up early (seriously: there’s nothing that pisses me off more).  Grr.

But the real conundrum is this: I really enjoyed prepping the lecture.  I made a potentially fateful decision: I put lecture prep before “my work” (reading for prelims, finishing minor field, etc.).  Usually, I try to spend my morning hours working on PhD stuff, then save class prep for the evening, when my brain is admittedly a little fuzzier and when I’m more likely to phone it in.  But not this time.  I had just read McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and decided that I wanted to do that.  So I threw myself into the lecture, spending at least 6 hours on the damn thing.  And I thought it was cracking good: battle stories, broad historical themes, portraits of leaders, the full meal deal.

And what’s the payoff?  Glass eyes and expressionless faces.  I’m not sure what I was expecting: applause?  Students literally on the edge of their seats?  Stupid.  Of course, I now know way more about the Civil War than before I wrote the lecture, and that’s not nothing.  But it’s an important lesson, I suppose: students in a lecture course might not be the best source for gratification for a scholar’s hard work.

If I were in a more scholarly mood and had more time, I would write a post about the history of Labor Day, and how it was a scheme to get American workers away from participating in May Day, which is International Workers’ Day.  Instead, I’ll refer you to this excellent book: Red, White, and Blue Letter Days by Matthew Dennis.  You’ll also learn about Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday: all food and no presents.  “Teh awesome,” as the Interwebs say.

An update: I’m not taking my pre-lims at the end of this week, as had previously been the plan.  One of my committee members can’t be there, and, frankly, I could use some more time.  Because I’m hella (hey, the 90s were my formative years) busy now with a full-time adjunct instructor job.  It’s a sweet gig about which I’ll surely have more to say as the semester wears on.  For now, though, I need to write some lectures…

I got my ass handed to me in seminar yesterday.  Just a regular trouncing.  I said one thing, then contradicted myself 30 minutes later, and the prof called me on it.  Damn, that hurt…especially because I didn’t even mean to contradict myself.  It was an honest-to-God I-think-I-get-it-oh-wait-what-the-hell-just-happened moment.  And for the rest of the day, I–once again–questioned whether I have any business in this business.

But this time I had to turn around and run two sections.  I had to shift from I’m-an-idiot to I-know-what-I’m-talking about mode within hours.  And it was rough; those were probably some of the worst sections I’ve ever led.  For whatever reason, the seminar ass-handing left me in doubt not only of my ability as an intellectual, but also as a teacher (which, of course, are not always one and the same).  This isn’t to say that I usually give off the impression that I’m an expert source of wisdom in seminar; indeed, I usually start off the term by explaining that I have as much to learn as the students do.  But there is a certain degree of confidence, of I-don’t-know-the-answer-but-I-do-know-we-can-find-out, that is necessary to running a section well.  Otherwise, the students will (a) run all over you and (b) give up believing, if they ever did, that the section is worth their time.  And though I didn’t get run over today–I’m something of a hard-ass–I certainly felt like I wasted their time.  And that stinks.

I wonder if this isn’t something that grad student development could take into consideration: the constant oscillation between knowing-that-you-don’t-know and having enough confidence to proceed.  Surely professors must deal with this; it might be nice to hear how they handle it.  But the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that professors are, like most everyone, extremely insecure and quite unwilling to show a chink in their armor.

Also: sorry about the use of these-sorts-of-hyphen-connected-phrases.  I’ll stop doing that.

This semester, I’m a teaching assistant for a remarkably bad professor.  I mean really, really bad, at least when it comes to lectures.  Don’t get me wrong–he’s a lovely person and great in one-on-one and small group situations.  But just miserable when it comes to lectures.  He uses 19th century English history for all of his cultural references, though this is a class on current US affairs.  He asks the most inane questions, stuff that undergraduates hear and must think, “Seriously, do you think I’m that dumb?  I’m not even going to justify that with a response.”  He asks “C’mon guys, doesn’t anyone have an answer?” while not seeing the five hands that are thrust in the air–some sort of vision problem, perhaps.  He makes sweeping assertions without stopping to explain or provide examples.  Finally (at least for the purposes of this list–I could go on), he’s a ham-fisted liberal, the kind that give the rest of us lefties a bad name.  This is the sort of professor that David Horowitz  salivates over: bringing in a political agenda that is absolutely irrelevant and so one-sided that even a sympathetic soul like me thinks, “Now, come on!”

The problem is this: what do I do?  From a scholarly perspective,  I’m a bit embarrassed to be a TA for this course; I find myself apologizing for the professor’s shoddy lectures.  In response to some of his questions, I have to resist the urge to interrupt with “Don’t you mean [x]?” in search of a question that is perhaps a bit more challenging/interesting.  And then there’s the political angle, where I just want him to be quiet before these students become even more convinced that every academic is blinded by liberal bias.  We’re already working against that stereotype, and this prof is just making things worse.

Of course, there’s nothing I can do.  I can’t stand up in the middle of class and call his bullshit.  I can’t  challenge him to come up with something a bit more nuanced.  An aside wouldn’t really work, either: “Excuse me, Professor?  Do you think you could take these students a bit more seriously, and could you also try to be cognizant of your overt political agenda?  Gee, thanks.”  Nope.  So, instead I’m trying to pick up the mess in discussion sections: explaining what the professor actually meant, defending his assertions, and dismissing accusations of bias with bogus statements like, “Well, he just wants to get you thinking on your own.  He’s being so obvious to show you what not to do.”  And all the while, thinking this: Man, I hope my TAs never have to do this.  Assuming that I ever get TAs…