Cotton the Clown

Howdy kids,

If you can't tell, I've already gone insane! The semester is almost over, and let me tell you, this old class clown is on his last leg. I think last week's readings gave the bit of guidance I've been needing in that dusty old space we call a classroom. In fact, Kahl's reading was probably the most helpful when it came to a step by step process of how to use critical pedagogy. Heck, I often wonder why my students even listen to a painted up jokster like me, but then I remember, it's because power relations also exist within the classroom. No matter how we engage our students, as long as we are welcoming them to the conversation and making them think critically, then we're doing our jobs and using our power wisely. TARNATION!
As you all know, this ain't my first rodeo. But even I have trouble with engaging my students and getting them to speak up in my classroom. How do I make you get what I'm teaching, son? Do I have to do a dance? Shoot, I'll sing a song if I gotta. But we all know that won't always do the trick. Bell and Golombisky have their penny exercise that obviously gets people talking and also thinking about how they respond. I used make students tell me their favorite joke at the beginning of the school year, and this would always loosen them up, but also welcome others to laugh. Sure, it didn't always go well because not everyone knows a good joke. I just wanted to break the silence, make people laugh, and let them know it's okay to speak. How do you make your students think? More importantly, how do you welcome their voice. How do you break the silence, even if it is just a chuckle?

blublbublub

11/25

What’s up, fellow teens!

It has been a tough few weeks for your dude. I would spare you the details, so I will.

I thought about quitting last week. Briefly, and half-heartedly, but I did. I couldn’t think; couldn’t focus on all the work I had left to do, much of which was already past due. Keeping up with this blog has been a casualty of my inability to do good brain. Brain won’t go right,! I needed a break. I took a self-care weekend, but that didn’t help; only put me deeper in the work hole. No one needs a vacation more than the person who just had one.

It’s a quiet depression now, I can laugh and hang, but i can recognize the depression because I’ve been here before. I am finding it increasingly difficult to care about scholarly pursuits. “Self-care” is becoming a prison of aimlessness, where the urge to escape the constantly shifting landscape of my own (and my students’) education into activities and mindsets that are more comforting but far less productive.

“Missing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is missing an opportunity to escape … to leave the demands of scholarly obligation and find refuge in wonder.” (Fassett and Warren, 2007)

The introduction to Critical Communication Pedagogy seemed to speak to me in particular; it was exactly what I needed at the time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is my nap time; my artsy video game; my umpteenth re-watch of The Fifth Element. It is comfort, and it is loneliness. Fassett and/or Warren didn’t go into the Music Zone, and I have to make my choice whether to sink back into the zones that keep me comfortable and docile.

“To go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and stand in the illusion we had created was to neglect our own commitments … Choosing the lullaby, a space of illusory comfort and peace, was never going to bring us a sense of real community”  (Fassett and Warren, 2007)

I’m so tired. It’s a tough pill to swallow. I’m so tired. The next two weeks are a mountain.

So it seems that both my blogs so far have been about reaffirmation, attempting to remind myself why I’m here. Getting back into school after over two years away has already been trying. I’m still at the beginning stages of the healing process. Ask me at the end of the semester and, depending on how things go, I may be able to tell you again with a heartfelt tone that I’m where I need to be.

Black Friday

All these performances pose dilemmas that require different pedagogical strategies intervention, inclusion and celebration, deconstruction. and transformation: how to speak the feminine but not femininity, engage race without being racist, claim yet qualify women's work, transform without silencing. (Bell & Golombisky, pp. 323)

I remember interviewing Justin Trudeau for 5080 last semester; I probed him about the concept of performance as understood by our department. He gave an explanation that has worked before, but my eyes glazed over. References to gender just made this a more perplexing struggle over meaning.

My boyfriend Drew came home with me for Thanksgiving this year. My stepmother inconspicuously woke us up this morning with the banging of pots and pans (The kitchen was spotless last night before bed). After two days... I can't (we have a hotel booked for the next two nights), so we held out- scanning Facebook. Drew paused my scrolling on Black Friday, a Steely Dan single.

"This was posted by Johny W. You met him yesterday."
He laughed, "Everyone looks the same here. The same height, the same clothes..."

He's not wrong.

There aren't a ton of scripts to choose from, and it's not for lack of imagination. I can dig performance as a statement or art form, but in Springfield performance is better conceptualized as "the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function"(google)... like a Ford Commercial. We want the upper middle material possessions, happy families, and trips to church every Sunday. If we need a new deck, we learn to build one. If we aren't getting along, we book a hotel. We have an extra cup of coffee some Sunday mornings. 

In a restrictive pedagogical atmosphere, cultural practices and student struggles over meaning do not intersect. The common problem of stifled consciousness or uncritical exploration of everyday discourses is the epicenter of restrictive pedagogy. (Hendrix, Jackson & Warren, pp. 182)

What is difficult to confront, is that this way of life benefits from restrictive pedagogy. You are given a task, and you figure it out. You CAN, you may just have to work harder, or be smarter, kinder, more common... It is not that inequalities don't exist, but thinking about them is too painful. Anger is consuming, and performance evaluations take conditions into account, at least that's what the Bible says... sometimes.

Another word I'm not sure of is double-bind, but I think that this is what's happening here. You are too busy responding to inequity to be bothered to intervene. We accept the hand we are dealt because it could be worse, our meanings and values do resemble dominant ones, and when we do succeed we get to bask in the glow of ego and false charity (Freire, 1970). When we don't, we obediently scapegoat our mechanical defects. Confidence stifled. Mission accomplished patriarchy.  
 

It is precisely an individual’s experience in tandem with the human capacity to coproduce one’s environment that complicates and ignites the possibilities for a critical progressive pedagogy. (Hendrix, Jackson & Warren, pp. 181)

One cool thing about performance, art or science, is it's ability to create some distance. The human capacity to create is something we share, and this makes our differences and weaknesses more accessible to critique... and hope. It makes since now why performance comes before power and hegemony in our 1010 schedule, and I'm excited to give it a try. I think this could be especially helpful in my class from hell. You've never seen so many good(and smart) girls.

Norman Rockwell's "Girl at the Mirror" 1954