[As another
semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some
complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark
AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own
teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]
On not
intervening in political discussions, and why perhaps I should have.
For most of the
semester, my third
time teaching an Intro
to Speech class for Fitchburg State’s Massachusetts
Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA) program went as smoothly
and happily as the prior two sections had. I love the chance to work with
fellow teachers, and the vocational educators in the MAVA program are a
particularly fun and interesting group with whom to connect. Both their short
persuasive speeches and long informative ones have taught me quite a bit about
a wide range of professional, personal, and social topics, and in general I have
found these classes to offer a refreshing change of pace from other aspects of
my teaching and work. That was all true this semester too, but there was one
two part-moment that felt less refreshing and more challenging and frustrating:
one of the teachers gave a rather strident persuasive short speech on why all
students should be required to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in schools;
and after that class many of her peers not only rousingly endorsed the
sentiments, but assumed that I felt precisely the same.
Obviously (for
any long-time readers
of this blog, at least) I did not share those sentiments, as my older son
has been kneeling
during the Pledge for more than a year now and his brother has begun doing
so as well this year. So part of my unhappy response to this moment was of
course personal, as it felt like both my sons’ actions and my own perspective
as their father were being wrongly categorized and criticized. I also took
significant issue with many of the core assumptions behind the teacher’s persuasive
speech, which consistently and unequivocally defined standing for the Pledge as
patriotic and exemplary, and any other action in that setting as thoughtless
and ignorant at best, unpatriotic at worst. That’s most definitely not how I
see the boys’ protests, of course, and as I
wrote in this post not at all how I’d frame either the origins, history, or
contemporary meanings of the Pledge. At the very least, the teacher’s
assumptions about the Pledge and Pledge protests, like her peers’ assumptions
about my own perspective and agreement, needed it seemed to me a good deal of
further thought and conversation.
I didn’t offer
those thoughts to the class, though. I knew it would be wrong to do so on the
spot (as that would overtly antagonize the speaker), and neither did I want to
do so while giving overall feedback on the speeches in a subsequent class (as
my response wouldn’t have been about the assignment’s expectations or my areas
for feedback). I thought about sharing my take further down the road, but
decided that doing so would be unnecessarily politicizing in a class not at all
focused on such conversations or themes (and doing so in no small measure
because of aggrieved feelings as a parent, which is never a good motivation for
classroom choices). I think that probably was the right decision, and one that
was supported by a significant majority of my teacher friends when I conducted
an informal straw poll on the Book of the Face. But when I have second thoughts
about my choice, they boil down to two questions: isn’t my goal of adding to
our collective memories one that should hold true in any setting (the teacher’s
speech included an absence of information about the Pledge’s actual, complex history
and evolution)?;
and similarly, if I’m working
to reclaim the concept of patriotism from the most simplified or
celebratory visions, wouldn’t this have been a perfect occasion to highlight
the critical
patriotism I’m advocating? Can’t say I have definite answers, but these are
the kinds of questions that arise when we teach in the age of Trump.
Spring preview
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall reflections you’d share?
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