learning styles

Last night Jon was saying that my thesis draws a line from students' style (as in fashion, etc.) and their learning styles. For example, one kid, a Muslim girl who wears a hijab, works within bent versions of the teacher's rules and academic expectations just like she works creatively around her hijab to achieve the look of "popularity" (read: in part, whiteness).

I usually hate when people talk about "learning styles" as if that's why meaningful academic opportunities are scarce in the hood. Because when people say "learning styles," they're talking about, "I'm a visual learner," or "I'm an audio learner." And sure, it's smart for teachers to present materials that students can access through multiple modalities -- if only because lesson planning in that way makes it less likely that they stand at the front of the room and drone on for fifty boring-ass minutes.

But Jonathan was talking about "learning styles" in terms of students' particular orientation to authority and knowledge. Students' orientation to authority and knowledge informs their identities; if your sense of yourself is that you're cool/bad, then the literacy practices you're more inclined to pick up are those associated with coolness/badness. Graffiti, rap, sagging your pants, etc. If, as was the case for me, you are a little fearful of displeasing authority figures, you're more likely to assent to the literacy practices imposed on you by the authority figure, regardless of whether or not the authority figure is legitimately authoritative.

What if we gave pre-service and in-service teachers lots of practice discovering students' orientation to power and knowledge -- practice reading the clothing, handwriting. body language, and tons of other ways that we perform our identities? What if more of us were capable of designing learning experiences that draw on the identities (and associated performances and literacy practices) of the students we traditionally fail, those students who resist authority? It's totally possible.

empty box of tampons

I don't know why I can't get over Michelle Wolf's monologue at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but I can't. It was so funny. And rad.

I particularly liked the jokes that felt like they had women as the target audience.

The "smoky eye" one. I wonder if there are a lot of men who didn't get the Maybelline reference. I mean, I've probably seen hundred of car commercials in my life, but I can't tell you the taglines of any of the major car companies. I haven't been socialized to give a shit. Most of those commercials are made for men, what with their need for speed. So I'm wondering how many men actually recognize the Maybelline tagline and how many of them don't because they tune out completely during makeup commercials.

I confess, I've bought eye shadow palettes that advertised themselves as smoky eye kits. To get the joke, you have to know (1) what the smoky eye is, and (2) you also kinda need to have some sense of how many smoky eye tutorials show up in women's magazines. Enough where it's possible to get the sense that we're all actually just on the quest for the perfect smoky eye.

The focus of the joke is Sanders' incessant lying in press briefings, not her eye shadow. But if you see how "burning facts and using the ashes as eye shadow" plays on the silly, upbeat tone of the smoky eye tutorial ("So resourceful!"), you get the added perk of a little satirical riff on women's socialization to be hyper-focused on our appearance.

A man couldn't make the eye shadow joke because they don't have to know about the work that goes into creating those sexy, smoky eyes of which they are the beneficiaries (if they are straight and buy into dominant beauty norms).

Also, the "Ivanka is as useful to women as an empty box of tampons" joke. We're the ones who know how annoying it is when you are sitting on the toilet, see that you got your period, reach into the cabinet under the sink for a tampon, and realize that the box is empty. It sucks so bad. Toilet paper wadded up to make do until you can get to CVS. That joke was for us.

All these men and anti-feminist women are crying about how she shouldn't make jokes about Sanders' and Ivanka's appearance (Oh, the diaper genie one!) as if they give a fuck about the ubiquitous reduction of women to their looks. She made no jokes about any woman's appearance. In fact, the kerfuffle over the jokes that aren't about women's appearance, but not about the ones that were actually making fun of individual men's looks, suggests that they really do equate women's value with their appearance. Make fun of Christie's and McConnell's nasty selves, and that's okay, because everyone knows that they're big, respectable men with big, respectable jobs. But if you go after a woman's appearance, you're leaving her with nothing! 

Time to Do Better

My friend Lillian and her friend are starting a website called Time to Do Better, and Lillian asked me to write something about being white. Why is it easier to write when something is "assigned"?

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Without a doubt, I grew up at-risk – of being a racist asshole. If not for a few patient, caring teachers who taught me to take seriously my own humanity and the humanity of others, I would have graduated and gone on to living a comfortable, upper middle-class life, absolutely ignorant to the historical and systemic injustices that afforded me such a privilege.

I’m not being facetious. A favorite thinker of mine, a man whose work one of those humanity-saving teachers asked me to read, is Paulo Freire, a teacher who worked with adult students living in poverty in Brazil. Freire posits that in an oppressive system, both the oppressed and the oppressors are dehumanized. In other words, when we passively accept or actively participate in the dehumanization of others, we make monsters of ourselves. We become less human.

As a white American, I occupy a space in the oppressor class. That doesn’t mean that I’m never presented with obstacles. Living with unearned privilege does not mean living without pain. It just means, for example, that I’m not afraid that I’m going to be killed if I get pulled over for a broken tail light because my reaching for my license and registration is mistaken for my reaching for my gun.

Another one of those teachers who was concerned with my humanity asked me to read the work of literary giant James Baldwin. In the biographical notes that open his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains, “I love America more than any country in the world, and, for exactly this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Word.

The United States became a global superpower largely because folks who came to be known as white people deployed white supremacy for their economic and political gain. America may have been founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all, but it was also founded on a lack of integrity because they didn’t really mean “all.”

European immigrants with the capital and chutzpa to “own” land used physical and emotional violence to force African and indigenous people to work for free and other, poorer European immigrants to work for very little, harvesting a product that made the “landowners” very wealthy. As the wealth of those who thought that they could also “own” humans accumulated, they became increasingly afraid of losing that wealth and therefore increasingly determined to quash any efforts by the people producing it to claim some of it for themselves. Thus came the campaign to codify “whiteness,” both legally and in the court of public opinion. African and indigenous people – already coping with the trauma of having their homes, languages, and traditional ways of life stolen from them – lost any hope of organizing in solidarity with the poor but now “white” people toiling alongside them who had chosen – out of economic and religious desperation, to be sure, but chosen nonetheless – to come to what we call America. In claiming their “whiteness,” those poor European immigrants, exploited though they may have been, at least had the legal rights to “own” themselves and their children.

And as time went on, “white” folks established a growing number of protections and opportunities for themselves. Like, for example, in 2018, white police officers – the professional descendants of slave patrols – can kill people of color with almost guaranteed impunity.

My own ancestors didn’t think they owned any humans. My dad’s ancestors came from Ireland during the famine about a decade before the American Civil War. My dad actually moved back to Ireland to marry my mom, and there they had Michael, Johnny, and Conor, my three older brothers; they came back to the US in the 1980s and had me and my little brother Neil.

That our ancestors were in Ireland when “whiteness” became a thing doesn’t change the fact that we live now in a country that was built for “white” folks like us.

My brothers and I grew up in a fairly quiet collar suburb on the southwest side of Chicago. We lived frugally, I thought, but all of us kids went to Catholic school and we never let two years go by without a family trip home to Ireland.

The first indication I saw that this country wasn’t built for everyone came when I was in high school. Before my family had moved back to the States, Conor, at nine weeks old, had contracted meningitis, which severely damaged his brain and left him with profound disabilities. As he approached age 21, my parents discovered that unless we were willing to send him off to live in an assisted living facility, he was going to be summarily exited from the public school system with no place to go and no right to any further public services in our state. At the time, Illinois was ranked 51st in the nation for services for adults with disabilities, behind all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

My mom, looking at having to quit the part-time job she went to when he was at school, sought out training in political advocacy so she could learn to lobby our representatives on Conor’s behalf. With her new-found comrades, she also worked to keep closed a state mental institution that was notorious in the disability community for abuse and neglect, and she enlisted 15-year-old me to collect petitions from my friends at school.

Looking back, I can see how daily life with Conor – who needs to be fed and dressed, who wears diapers and doesn’t speak or otherwise communicate but makes seemingly random loud noises, who drools constantly, and who has frequent seizures – instilled in me the understanding that all people’s dignity and humanity must be respected and preserved no matter the efforts involved. If I let my brother sit in his own shitty diaper, for example, what does that say about me, about my dignity and humanity?

In his graceful, unconventional teaching style, Conor taught me how to communicate with people in power as a proxy for him, and even more importantly, he taught me that people in power would, if they could, ignore his rights. Ableism and racism aren’t the same, but understanding the former, I think, increased my chances of being willing to understand the latter.

Eventually I became a teacher, too. But thankfully, I didn’t stop getting taught.

Jamarrio sat in the front row in my third period class. One day early in the year, we were reading from the first chapter of Night, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, when I noticed Jamarrio throwing his book down and laying his head on the desk. For some lucky reason, instead of telling him, “Head up, hun,” my go-to gentle admonition, I crouched down and whispered, “What’s up?”

“I can’t read this,” he told me. I figured that he was having difficulty reading the text, and I “knew” that I needed to respond in a way that would de-escalate his frustration and prevent the situation from turning into an issue of defiance.

Before I could respond, though, he continued, “These people are going to be killed. They can’t stop it, and no one is going to stand up for them. I’m not reading it.” I was stunned into silence. Not a lack of skill nor discipline, the reason he “couldn’t read” this book was the depth of his empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and his unwillingness to be another complicit witness to their story.

Guiltily, I realized that I had made the racist assumption that as a black teenage boy he must be a struggling reader. I had narrowly avoided reducing him to a negative stereotype; he had saved me from myself by letting me in on his emotional experience, gently teaching me that he was a fully complex human being just like me.

Countless studies demonstrate that the descendants of European immigrants in the US, rich or poor, continue to benefit politically and economically from the idea of whiteness, even when we’re not particularly powerful or wealthy.

There is, after all, lingering political power in being descended from a human legally affirmed as human rather than from a human legally made property. Look at how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted in 2013, making it demonstrably harder for the descendants of Africans to participate in the US democracy.

There is, after all, lingering economic power in being descended from a human who was allowed to own himself (if not herself) rather than from a human who was legally owned. Look at redlining, the deliberate racial segregation of Chicago starting in the 1930s, which created the ghettoes where the descendants of Africans continue to live without the public resources allocated through the higher property taxes of historically white neighborhoods.

White folks in the US have resources afforded us by the European immigrants who used white supremacy to establish the way we do things in this country, and we bear the pain, whether we feel it or remain numb to it, of having our dehumanization – and the dehumanization of people of color – normalized.

Having power – or not having power – isn’t what makes us human. But having power and using it to dehumanize others, or having power and not using it to defend those without it from dehumanization, makes us monstrous.