What to Juggle

You’re back again, huh? Welcome, welcome. You can keep your ticket this time. The show is on me. 

Have we ever assessed how we create an open environment with our peers? We have talked a lot about how we engage with our students, but what about with our peers? Have we really taken the time to cultivate an open environment among each other? We might have an informal get together here and there, but I wonder if this is enough sometimes. Of course, it’s unrealistic to know how all of my colleagues tick, but it would be interesting to have another forum to get to know one another. Pedagogy has served as that meeting place, in some ways, but I hope that over the course of the next few semesters we find new and other ways to have that. I know that most of us, from pedagogy at least, will be taking introduction to graduate studies (I think that’s the course name) so hopefully that course will help foster more of a sense of family amongst us TAs. 

I wanted to reflect on a quote from hooks’s book Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. I could relate to a lot of what hooks says in the book and some of it was really interesting to see explained out in words that I would have never grasped for. Words to express things I did not know I had been feeling and words to express things that I had felt before but never really mulled on. 

I recall discovering hooks back in undergrad during one of my communication courses. We watched her video Cultural criticism and transformation. From there I tried to eat everything hooks on Youtube. For a while, I was on a hooks hook. I even got my aunt to feast alongside me and I gushed to my professor about the bonding activity hooks had created for my aunt and I. I had read other authors before, but at that time hooks seemed to feed my soul in a new way. Perhaps, it was the change in demographics that made me more attached to her in that moment. 

It is always inspiring to see someone who looks like me in an academic setting. It was usually something I never really thought of. But gradually as I got older, I began to notice, especially in college, as the black and brown faces of my teachers, professors, and faculty dwindled. However, the school’s president was a woman of color, which reminded me, even if I didn’t see the faces as much in my everyday life that I could go anywhere. It was feasible to be as I am and get where I want. I doubted myself relentlessly, usually just for being me. But, I realized others doubted me for what they saw on the outside.

“Students of color and some white women expressed fear that they will be judged as intellectually inadequate by these peers. I have taught brilliant students of color, many of them seniors, who manage never to speak in classroom settings. Some express the feeling that they are less likely to suffer any kind of assault if they simply do not assert their subjectivity” (bell hooks, p. 40)

To most, it’s no secret that I am a mouse in my personal classes, at least I try to be...or that’s the role at least that my brain instantly says I should play in that setting. I find that the cycle is so much harder to break in pedagogy specifically. I’m not exactly sure why this is the case. It could be the seating. All eyes can shift onto me, when I speak, (which is uncomfortable) though sometimes I do find certain head nods from peers to be encouraging. It is almost as if they understand what I am talking about. I’m glad to know that that makes one of us! Smaller groups seem to make me have increased communication apprehension. 

I second guess my perception of things quite a bit, regardless of what it is. I could know the answer backwards and forwards and still wonder if it was correct. But, this role is again different from 1010. I am not afraid to not know the answer there. I would love to have the answers for all of my students all of the time, but sometimes I cannot. Therefore, I am honest with them and say to them something like, “That is a good question. I don’t know the answer to that right now, but I will find out. ``. I am not afraid to be truthful with them and I have little shame in doing so. But in a graduate class of mine, I would shrivel up and die before such words would escape my mouth. I monitor myself a lot. I am secretly the government agent in my own life. Neither of us really stops listening, we’re always there, y’know? It’s just your average Tuesday. 

BIGS tip: Give yourself permission to feel, to do, and to be without provocation.