A moment of contemplation
I've not been reading livejournal much lately, being altogether too wrapped up in the exercise in futility that is planning lessons the kids still insist on ignoring, but I logged in yesterday only to have a moment of staring at the screen going "Whoa. Did fandom just explode?"
Several (as in still doing it) hours of reading later, I was able to conclude "Ah. No, fandom didn't explode. Fandom is in Yelling Class."
Okay, it's not a perfect comparison; I think what's going on is way more out of control than Yelling Class ever got, and there are key and crucial differences between having this kind of discussion face-to-face in real-time and having it on the internet, but damn, are there ever similarities.
Yelling Class was centred around one of the courses we took in teacher's college, and I honestly can't remember what it was actually called -- I did check my transcript, but due to the strange nature of site divisions at York, the name of several courses are different from the ones on my syllabi. I think it was Foundations. Truth be told, most of the classes ended up blurring into one another, especially by the end, so it certainly wasn't limited to just one class.
I'm wondering if it was one of the courses for which York said to the site directors: "teach something about this", but what was actually taught varied depending on which site you were at. Our site, Regent Park, was located in one of the highest-poverty, highest-immigration rate areas of Toronto, and as such, the focus of our program was in teaching for equity and diversity.
The necessity of this can be illustrated by looking at Rose Avenue, where I first practice taught, and where I ended up returning because I loved the experience so much (and heartily wish I was there now). At Rose Avenue, I think there were maybe two white kids (sisters at that). But the teachers at the school were almost entirely white.
The potential problem therein is that kids learn better when they see a point to learning. When they can connect, relate to, and understand the material taught, the examples used, and yes, the people actually doing the teaching. Where the danger lies is when a teacher with the best of intentions goes in unprepared and unwittingly starts creating gaps between the student and the learning without even realizing it.
To use one example brought up in class, when your class is full of Aartis and Awabs and Tenzins, and your textbooks are full of Jimmys, Sallys, and Suzys engaging in very white-upper-middle-class activities, you start sending subtle, unconscious messages (one that came up, for example, that white people are better at math because they're the ones in the book). But that's barely scratching the surface of teaching that kind of student population. Different cultures have fundamentally different ways of learning, and if you're not aware of it, you can shut down a kid who's just trying to learn in the manner in which they've been trained from birth. We are shaped by our experiences, our families, our cultures, and our experiences, and if you don't work to understand those of your students, you can end up causing serious harm.
So, part of what Yelling Class aimed to do was to make us aware of things like this, so that we would be better teachers for the kinds of student populations we would eventually be teaching. But the first day of Yelling Class, our professor (a black woman), told us "this class will make you uncomfortable. This class will make you angry." And she was right.
It became known to many of us as Yelling Class because that's what it usually ended up being. The classes revolved heavily around discussions of racism, prejudice, and inequality, and though we touched on things like anti-semitism, homosexuality, and feminism, we always seemed to end up back at race. Usually emotionally and at great volume.
I think a large part of the problem lay in the fact that we were dealing with very real, very emotional pain for everyone involved. Everyone has been treated unjustly at some point in their lives. Often, the arguments would get triggered by some sort of comparison. For example, comparing the experience of being a child from an [insert white european immigrant background] family to being [insert non-white background]. Some people would get upset that their very real experiences with injustice seemed to be shoved into the background, or feel that the class was heavily biased toward the black students.
The thing is, if you're a human being, pain sucks. It's very deep, very personal, and can have long-lasting effects. So often problems would arise because it would seem like we were playing "my pain is greater than yours". And the people of colour in the class were not trying to negate the pain of, for example, being treated differently because you're Jewish. What they would try to do is explain how it's different being treated differently because of the colour of your skin because, unlike being Jewish, you can't HIDE the colour of your skin, and try to explain the pervasive and systemic racism that is still present in society. But quite often, either through the heat of emotion or through the filters of perception, that would be taken as "yes, but my pain is GREATER and MORE IMPORTANT than yours", which of course was met defensively. And then divisions would form and sides would be taken. And volume would escalate.
And yet, therein lay the value of having face-to-face Yelling Class, as opposed to doing it anonymously on the Internet. There's something about seeing your friend -- one of the most upbeat, kind, articulate, and happy people you've ever met -- reduced to powerless silence by his tears during his recounting of a racist act against him that really enforces how immediate and real this kind of pain is. And how personal experiences with injustice matter to everyone. A lot of people cried during Yelling Class. I did several times.
Some of us ended up getting very tired of Yelling Class, because for every "informative" class we had (and we did learn some truly startling things during that class, especially when looking at statistics and connections between race, income, and education), it would seem that we would end up having the same shouted conversation over and over and over again. Once we were even divided into "white" and "non-white" groups and separated to talk over issues of racism, and then brought back together, which resulted in yet another full-volume argument. Don't even get me started on what happened when we brought up the topic of Black Focused Schooling.
The class ended up falling into a few categories: students of colour who would yell, white students of various backgrounds who would yell, students who would try to avoid the class whenever possible, students who would mentally, verbally, and emotionally disengage and retreat in silence to their own heads for those three hours, and students who would wring their hands and wonder "why we all can't just get along?"
Often, in small groups, we ended up discussing what the point was. Why keep having the class if all we did was have the same argument, over and over, yet never seem to come to any resolution? What was the point of arguing if we were never told what we could do about any of it? We felt like hamsters in a wheel, running and running and running but never getting anywhere, and the class began to feel like an exercise in futility.
It wasn't until well after graduation that I began to realize how much Yelling Class had done to me.
Yelling Class began with one of those circle games, where you write in circles on a page aspects of you that define who you are. Mine were things like "female", "teacher", "writer", "geek", "fat". When everyone began to read theirs out, interesting trends emerged. Almost none of the white students included "white" in their circles. All most all of the black students included "black."
What I can see, looking back on that circle game after graduation, was that most people included in their circles things about themselves for which they had, at some point, been the victims of abuse. "Fat" and "geek" were mine. Others from the white students included "Jewish", "gay", "[immigrant background]". It should have been telling that "black" appeared on so many of the black students' pages. But it took me a while.
At the beginning of Yelling Class, I also prided myself on all the work I had done to make myself "colourblind". It was in Yelling Class that I learned how incredibly racist that was.
One of the best vocalizations of how awful the term "colourblind" really is came back to the circle game, and how many of the students listed black (or Korean, or whatever they happened to be) as ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL, DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF WHO THEY ARE AS A PERSON. When you try to be colourblind, you are actually discounting an entire aspect of who a person is. For white people, who almost unanimously did not list their colour as a defining characteristic of who they are, this doesn't appear to be a big deal. But for someone who DOES, you are essentially saying "I dismiss this entire part of you that is integral to your personality and part of your definition of who you are as unimportant and of no concern to me."
It's a hard thing to realize that you are carrying something like racism around with you, however unconsciously. I mean, we're human. Most of us want very much to be good people, and try our hardest to be so. So it's hard when you come to realize that something you had perceived as being anti-racist was actually very, very much the opposite. Reactions to learning this can differ greatly, from horrified acceptance to vehement denial.
No, the point of Yelling Class was the opposite of colour blindness. The point of Yelling Class was to open the eyes of all the teachers, particularly those who had been living in privilege, and help them to see the inequalities that appear all around in society, in the schools, and in themselves.
Our professor once said something that helped a lot of us with the issue. She said that, as a black woman, she felt safer driving around the American Deep South than she did in Toronto. Because in the Deep South, you can SEE the racism and you know which bits to avoid. In Toronto, it's all been driven underground.
I've slowly, in bits and peices, started to understand exactly how important Yelling Class has been to me. In the shifts to my perception it has caused. In how I've started noticing injustices and inequalities that I never saw before. In how I'm better able to examine my OWN actions, to catch myself before saying or doing things I might never have though twice about, in my willingness to learn and adapt and change.
But perhaps the biggest moment of revelation came not that long ago, during a visit with family.
I love my family. Dearly. But sometimes they are not the most tolerant of people. They don't think they're bigoted, and most of them pride themselves on being anti-racist, anti-prejudiced, what-have-you, yet it comes out, slowly and pervasively. They will often say things that make me inwardly and outwardly cringe ("I have a problem with Native people, because they're just lazy and sit around on the res collecting money" springs immediately to mind), but I've never been able to address it because the entire tangled mess of trying to deconstruct their prejudice, societal stereotypes, and my own ignorance would tangle in my throat and render me mute.
Yet just recently, I was told by a family member that she found "the black people in Africa are so much nicer than the ones in North America", and for the first time, I was able to discuss it with her. I'm not sure how much of an impression I made, or how much I was able to change her perceptions, but for the first time, I actually had a lexicon, a vocabulary, a structure, and tools with which to discuss things like the impact of centuries cultural history, cultural identity, cultural diversity, white privilege, and unwitting prejudice.
Yelling Class, despite how often it left me feeling like there was nothing I could say, actually gave me the ability to speak.
That was my "ah-ha!" moment. The point at which I realized that yes, I had in fact learned something more important than raw knowledge from Yelling Class.
The problem that I see is, as humans, we like putting things in boxes. Male or Female. Black or White. Open or Closed. Yet nature in its very essence is about continuous variation and change, and abhors either/or for the most part. Gender is not either/or, it exists on a spectrum with most of the population gathered around one end or the other. And there is no end to the racism discussion. We don't get to complete a series of challenges and go "hurray, racism is over now, let's have cake!"
It's constant. It's ongoing. And that, I finally see, was the point of the seemingly endless circle of arguments that went on in Yelling Class. It seemed like it didn't have a purpose or any sort of end, it seemed like we never got anywhere, but each time arguments happened, each time grievances were aired, two things were accomplished:
1. Our eyes were opened a little more as we learned how to really listen.
2. We were a little better equipped with the words and tools needed to actually DO something about it.
No, Yelling Class was not perfect. There were some people who were irreparably hurt by some of the things said. There are some people, inherently good people, I will never be able to see the same way because of some of the things that they said or views they expressed. There are some people who will never change. But there were some people, the people who were there to learn, who took it seriously, and who genuinely tried to listen and communicate, who were actually altered for the better because of the experience.
I'm not perfect. I know that there's a lot I still have to learn. I realize that there is still a great deal I don't understand, and that I will probably find a number of prejudices still in me as I go through life. I will very probably make mistakes, I will very probably say stupid things, and I will very probably say or do something that hurts or offends someone without ever intending to.
But I think that I came out of Yelling Class a slightly better person than I was when I went in. That I was opened to the idea that I am NOT perfect and that I CAN learn and change and acknowledge my shortcomings and failings. And that I was equipped, at least in part, to help my students effect that change and give THEM the tools to address it.
And that, I think, was the point.
ETA: Yelling Class Speaks
Several (as in still doing it) hours of reading later, I was able to conclude "Ah. No, fandom didn't explode. Fandom is in Yelling Class."
Okay, it's not a perfect comparison; I think what's going on is way more out of control than Yelling Class ever got, and there are key and crucial differences between having this kind of discussion face-to-face in real-time and having it on the internet, but damn, are there ever similarities.
Yelling Class was centred around one of the courses we took in teacher's college, and I honestly can't remember what it was actually called -- I did check my transcript, but due to the strange nature of site divisions at York, the name of several courses are different from the ones on my syllabi. I think it was Foundations. Truth be told, most of the classes ended up blurring into one another, especially by the end, so it certainly wasn't limited to just one class.
I'm wondering if it was one of the courses for which York said to the site directors: "teach something about this", but what was actually taught varied depending on which site you were at. Our site, Regent Park, was located in one of the highest-poverty, highest-immigration rate areas of Toronto, and as such, the focus of our program was in teaching for equity and diversity.
The necessity of this can be illustrated by looking at Rose Avenue, where I first practice taught, and where I ended up returning because I loved the experience so much (and heartily wish I was there now). At Rose Avenue, I think there were maybe two white kids (sisters at that). But the teachers at the school were almost entirely white.
The potential problem therein is that kids learn better when they see a point to learning. When they can connect, relate to, and understand the material taught, the examples used, and yes, the people actually doing the teaching. Where the danger lies is when a teacher with the best of intentions goes in unprepared and unwittingly starts creating gaps between the student and the learning without even realizing it.
To use one example brought up in class, when your class is full of Aartis and Awabs and Tenzins, and your textbooks are full of Jimmys, Sallys, and Suzys engaging in very white-upper-middle-class activities, you start sending subtle, unconscious messages (one that came up, for example, that white people are better at math because they're the ones in the book). But that's barely scratching the surface of teaching that kind of student population. Different cultures have fundamentally different ways of learning, and if you're not aware of it, you can shut down a kid who's just trying to learn in the manner in which they've been trained from birth. We are shaped by our experiences, our families, our cultures, and our experiences, and if you don't work to understand those of your students, you can end up causing serious harm.
So, part of what Yelling Class aimed to do was to make us aware of things like this, so that we would be better teachers for the kinds of student populations we would eventually be teaching. But the first day of Yelling Class, our professor (a black woman), told us "this class will make you uncomfortable. This class will make you angry." And she was right.
It became known to many of us as Yelling Class because that's what it usually ended up being. The classes revolved heavily around discussions of racism, prejudice, and inequality, and though we touched on things like anti-semitism, homosexuality, and feminism, we always seemed to end up back at race. Usually emotionally and at great volume.
I think a large part of the problem lay in the fact that we were dealing with very real, very emotional pain for everyone involved. Everyone has been treated unjustly at some point in their lives. Often, the arguments would get triggered by some sort of comparison. For example, comparing the experience of being a child from an [insert white european immigrant background] family to being [insert non-white background]. Some people would get upset that their very real experiences with injustice seemed to be shoved into the background, or feel that the class was heavily biased toward the black students.
The thing is, if you're a human being, pain sucks. It's very deep, very personal, and can have long-lasting effects. So often problems would arise because it would seem like we were playing "my pain is greater than yours". And the people of colour in the class were not trying to negate the pain of, for example, being treated differently because you're Jewish. What they would try to do is explain how it's different being treated differently because of the colour of your skin because, unlike being Jewish, you can't HIDE the colour of your skin, and try to explain the pervasive and systemic racism that is still present in society. But quite often, either through the heat of emotion or through the filters of perception, that would be taken as "yes, but my pain is GREATER and MORE IMPORTANT than yours", which of course was met defensively. And then divisions would form and sides would be taken. And volume would escalate.
And yet, therein lay the value of having face-to-face Yelling Class, as opposed to doing it anonymously on the Internet. There's something about seeing your friend -- one of the most upbeat, kind, articulate, and happy people you've ever met -- reduced to powerless silence by his tears during his recounting of a racist act against him that really enforces how immediate and real this kind of pain is. And how personal experiences with injustice matter to everyone. A lot of people cried during Yelling Class. I did several times.
Some of us ended up getting very tired of Yelling Class, because for every "informative" class we had (and we did learn some truly startling things during that class, especially when looking at statistics and connections between race, income, and education), it would seem that we would end up having the same shouted conversation over and over and over again. Once we were even divided into "white" and "non-white" groups and separated to talk over issues of racism, and then brought back together, which resulted in yet another full-volume argument. Don't even get me started on what happened when we brought up the topic of Black Focused Schooling.
The class ended up falling into a few categories: students of colour who would yell, white students of various backgrounds who would yell, students who would try to avoid the class whenever possible, students who would mentally, verbally, and emotionally disengage and retreat in silence to their own heads for those three hours, and students who would wring their hands and wonder "why we all can't just get along?"
Often, in small groups, we ended up discussing what the point was. Why keep having the class if all we did was have the same argument, over and over, yet never seem to come to any resolution? What was the point of arguing if we were never told what we could do about any of it? We felt like hamsters in a wheel, running and running and running but never getting anywhere, and the class began to feel like an exercise in futility.
It wasn't until well after graduation that I began to realize how much Yelling Class had done to me.
Yelling Class began with one of those circle games, where you write in circles on a page aspects of you that define who you are. Mine were things like "female", "teacher", "writer", "geek", "fat". When everyone began to read theirs out, interesting trends emerged. Almost none of the white students included "white" in their circles. All most all of the black students included "black."
What I can see, looking back on that circle game after graduation, was that most people included in their circles things about themselves for which they had, at some point, been the victims of abuse. "Fat" and "geek" were mine. Others from the white students included "Jewish", "gay", "[immigrant background]". It should have been telling that "black" appeared on so many of the black students' pages. But it took me a while.
At the beginning of Yelling Class, I also prided myself on all the work I had done to make myself "colourblind". It was in Yelling Class that I learned how incredibly racist that was.
One of the best vocalizations of how awful the term "colourblind" really is came back to the circle game, and how many of the students listed black (or Korean, or whatever they happened to be) as ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL, DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF WHO THEY ARE AS A PERSON. When you try to be colourblind, you are actually discounting an entire aspect of who a person is. For white people, who almost unanimously did not list their colour as a defining characteristic of who they are, this doesn't appear to be a big deal. But for someone who DOES, you are essentially saying "I dismiss this entire part of you that is integral to your personality and part of your definition of who you are as unimportant and of no concern to me."
It's a hard thing to realize that you are carrying something like racism around with you, however unconsciously. I mean, we're human. Most of us want very much to be good people, and try our hardest to be so. So it's hard when you come to realize that something you had perceived as being anti-racist was actually very, very much the opposite. Reactions to learning this can differ greatly, from horrified acceptance to vehement denial.
No, the point of Yelling Class was the opposite of colour blindness. The point of Yelling Class was to open the eyes of all the teachers, particularly those who had been living in privilege, and help them to see the inequalities that appear all around in society, in the schools, and in themselves.
Our professor once said something that helped a lot of us with the issue. She said that, as a black woman, she felt safer driving around the American Deep South than she did in Toronto. Because in the Deep South, you can SEE the racism and you know which bits to avoid. In Toronto, it's all been driven underground.
I've slowly, in bits and peices, started to understand exactly how important Yelling Class has been to me. In the shifts to my perception it has caused. In how I've started noticing injustices and inequalities that I never saw before. In how I'm better able to examine my OWN actions, to catch myself before saying or doing things I might never have though twice about, in my willingness to learn and adapt and change.
But perhaps the biggest moment of revelation came not that long ago, during a visit with family.
I love my family. Dearly. But sometimes they are not the most tolerant of people. They don't think they're bigoted, and most of them pride themselves on being anti-racist, anti-prejudiced, what-have-you, yet it comes out, slowly and pervasively. They will often say things that make me inwardly and outwardly cringe ("I have a problem with Native people, because they're just lazy and sit around on the res collecting money" springs immediately to mind), but I've never been able to address it because the entire tangled mess of trying to deconstruct their prejudice, societal stereotypes, and my own ignorance would tangle in my throat and render me mute.
Yet just recently, I was told by a family member that she found "the black people in Africa are so much nicer than the ones in North America", and for the first time, I was able to discuss it with her. I'm not sure how much of an impression I made, or how much I was able to change her perceptions, but for the first time, I actually had a lexicon, a vocabulary, a structure, and tools with which to discuss things like the impact of centuries cultural history, cultural identity, cultural diversity, white privilege, and unwitting prejudice.
Yelling Class, despite how often it left me feeling like there was nothing I could say, actually gave me the ability to speak.
That was my "ah-ha!" moment. The point at which I realized that yes, I had in fact learned something more important than raw knowledge from Yelling Class.
The problem that I see is, as humans, we like putting things in boxes. Male or Female. Black or White. Open or Closed. Yet nature in its very essence is about continuous variation and change, and abhors either/or for the most part. Gender is not either/or, it exists on a spectrum with most of the population gathered around one end or the other. And there is no end to the racism discussion. We don't get to complete a series of challenges and go "hurray, racism is over now, let's have cake!"
It's constant. It's ongoing. And that, I finally see, was the point of the seemingly endless circle of arguments that went on in Yelling Class. It seemed like it didn't have a purpose or any sort of end, it seemed like we never got anywhere, but each time arguments happened, each time grievances were aired, two things were accomplished:
1. Our eyes were opened a little more as we learned how to really listen.
2. We were a little better equipped with the words and tools needed to actually DO something about it.
No, Yelling Class was not perfect. There were some people who were irreparably hurt by some of the things said. There are some people, inherently good people, I will never be able to see the same way because of some of the things that they said or views they expressed. There are some people who will never change. But there were some people, the people who were there to learn, who took it seriously, and who genuinely tried to listen and communicate, who were actually altered for the better because of the experience.
I'm not perfect. I know that there's a lot I still have to learn. I realize that there is still a great deal I don't understand, and that I will probably find a number of prejudices still in me as I go through life. I will very probably make mistakes, I will very probably say stupid things, and I will very probably say or do something that hurts or offends someone without ever intending to.
But I think that I came out of Yelling Class a slightly better person than I was when I went in. That I was opened to the idea that I am NOT perfect and that I CAN learn and change and acknowledge my shortcomings and failings. And that I was equipped, at least in part, to help my students effect that change and give THEM the tools to address it.
And that, I think, was the point.
ETA: Yelling Class Speaks