An Unreasonable Thing
Dancing to Foucault and riding the bus
Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, I stand before a group of 18 young people and embarrass myself. I stand in silence, for one minute, with my eyes closed. I don’t know what the youth are doing. I don’t know if they’re mouthing “OH MY GOD,” making mock namaste hands, pretending to radiate vibes from a third eye, or worse. I – mostly – don’t care. I have invited them to close their eyes, and follow their breath, and then I close my eyes and follow my breath and hope for the best. At the end of one minute, my phone startles us all with its bright mechanical twinkle, and we begin class.
“Do one unreasonable thing every day,” a friend recently told me. I think this is good practice for living: it strengthens the muscles of non-conformity and integrity, asking us to check in with who we really are, what we believe in, and what we need. We are such group animals: it is so hard for us to do anything the group might find terribly cringe. But it’s also essential to our personal thriving. So many of us are “instinct-injured” – a term I learned working on my latest project. We’ve spent so long doing what was expected of us or what everyone else was doing or whatever was in the bounds of acceptable that we’ve forgotten what we actually love. What feels good in the body.
When I invite my students to “see what is here for you, today” in this minute of mindfulness, a few close their eyes in anticipation, and even seem to be, maybe, possibly, happy. Like for a moment, they can just recognize what’s actually here. I ask them to acknowledge their expectations. I tell them, “Maybe you’re passionate or upset about the reading. Maybe you found it tedious. Maybe you’re confused or dreading it. Maybe you’re exhausted from exams. Just see whatever is here for you today.” The goal isn’t to get rid of it or to suddenly make it okay. It’s just to take a breath and be present long enough to recognize where we are, and what we’re carrying.
I have never defined myself as a teacher, even though, looking back, I’ve taught now for more than ten years. Always part time, and in a lot of wild contexts (as a clueless twenty-three-year old on an island in the South Indian Sea, correcting French high schoolers on verb conjugations; in office buildings in Bogotá, Colombia, in faded corduroys I’d worn hiking through the jungle; at a fancy private college in Japan, in stiff formalwear). Instead, I’ve identified as a writer. Writing has long been the most central part of my life and the focus of my energy and ambition. Writing confers more status (which is not to say, ha, a lot). Teaching for me was a means to an end: first, a way to travel; then a condition of grad school funding; then, a source of income and means of affiliation with a university and its research libraries and resources.
I can recognize now that a lot of the resistance I’ve held to calling myself a teacher stems from an association of teaching with femaleness. Think of a calling that conjures up more contempt and mock sweetness than “kindergarten teacher.” We do a lot of earnest celebrating of teachers, but culturally their work is seen as maybe a few notches above that of babysitter in terms of status and intellect/skill required. I have witnessed the eyes of Important High Status Menfolk glaze over at the mere mention of teaching, somewhat like they glaze over at the mention of birth. At a writing conference once, I offered a quick explanation of Ordinary Insanity as an analysis of the U.S. institutions of birth and motherhood, and when the eyes of the Important Menfolk went vacant I quickly pivoted and asked, “Did you know Aristotle believed that every sperm contained a tiny fetus?”
“Now that’s interesting!” one boomed.
Anyway, I have mostly framed, defined, introduced myself as a writer. But lately, for reasons partly related to mindfulness, partly related to a complete overhaul of my understanding of education during COVID, and partly related to a general midlife crisis (YAY!) teaching has consumed more of my identity. I still consider myself, first and foremost, a writer, in temperament, calling, and essence, for better or worse (sorry family!). But I have come to really value teaching.
In the beginning, I think I was very invested in what Paulo Freire calls the “banking” model of education. That is, I was making deposits of my Specialized Knowledge into the Empty Minds of the students. I knew, and they did not, until I told them (or asked leading questions to get them to figure it out). This wasn’t so much the case during my ESL years, but certainly during my early teaching of writing. There were things they had to find in the readings, lessons they had to learn, right and wrong ways of doing things.
That is still all true – contrary to the popular belief of your average freshman STEM major, it is in fact possible to be wrong in English! – but much less so. Now, instead of asking the question, “Did they do it right?” I mostly ask, “Are they thinking?” And by “thinking,” I mean: are they engaged? Are they bringing their full selves to the table? Are they moving beyond all the same old rote bullshit they’re used to enacting, are they struggling a bit? Are they taking risks? Are they, actually, kind of, having a good time?
Before our first discussion on Foucault, I invited them all to stand up and dance. C’mon, move! I said. Do some jumping jacks! I did Yoga With Adriene knocking-on-heaven’s-door arm swings. I encouraged forward folds and lunges. They had all come in with these very dour, long, oh-my-god-what-on-earth-French-theory-did-you-just-make-us-read faces and were ready to slog through an hour and a half of discussion doing whatever it took to get the participation points, but then the mood changed. Just enough. I am not talking Dead Poets Society magic here, okay. I am not painting myself as some maestro converting a reluctant generation of engineers and bio majors into impassioned creative writers. I’m just recognizing that it’s the seemingly minor intangibles that matter as much as any mastery of cultural theory or criticism.
Like the bus ride to campus. I walk five blocks, I get the bus. It is invariably a gray winter day. Maybe a hint of sun on brick, a blur of weary pine. Sometimes I listen to Coldplay because screw it, do something unreasonable every day, I am 40 and no longer have anything to prove, suckers. I have the same sensation I used to have walking beside the Indian Ocean at dusk, or running at 5 am in Japanese parks: someday you’ll remember this. I treat myself to a coffee that is approximately 1/10th of my adjunct salary. Sometimes I even have the luxury of 3 minutes sitting on a bench, sipping the coffee, watching all the students bustle along in outrageously huge white sneakers I can’t believe are back in fashion, thinking about how no one anymore knows who Ira freaking Glass is and I am obsolete.
Then I walk into the math building, where I’ve actually enjoyed having a tiny classroom away from all the major centers on campus. There is never anyone there besides a few dudes in sweaters microwaving something in a little lounge, and one time I walked into my classroom and on the whiteboard was written in small, perfect lettering the word math, and it was like a lovely koan left for someone about to ask her students to read their poems aloud and “listen for the heat!” There are posters announcing summer school for “Coulomb branches and knot homology,” where the sole graphic is a cylinder full of swirling lines. There are posters advertising lectures entitled “Internal Waves in 2D Aquaria and Homeomorphisms of the Circle.” There is a billboard with the proud, optimistic heading “Mathematical moments!” that has never contained a single posting. There are a weird amount of 1970s-vibey bathrooms no one seems to have ever used and a strange little room with an 8x11 piece of printer paper taped to the door reading “ABSOLUTELY NO FOOD IN HERE.”
I enjoy the aesthetics of the math department. I enjoy hanging out. I enjoy sipping my coffee. I enjoy standing vulnerable and weird and breathing with my eyes closed for sixty seconds. On the best days – because there are the days of drudgery, the days of did anyone do the reading – I teach myself. I am surprised, I am baffled along with them.
On our second discussion of Foucault, fearing the lackadaisical I-had-to-read-it-for-English-class vibe and the painfully oversimplified “Panopticism is a prison with a great observation system!” arguments, I decided to make my students debate. The premise was basic: one group would defend the notion that Panopticism is a beneficial, necessary, and helpful system, and the other would argue that it is harmful and dangerous. I pointed out this was a reductive binary, etc, etc, but we’d employ it to engage more deeply with the text. Each group got 1 point for a clear, strong argument (this was left up, somewhat ambiguously I know, to three appointed judges); 1 point for using a specific anecdote/example from the reading; and 2 points for each quote. Obviously, wise group that they are, they zeroed in on the quotes, which was – evil, scheming laugh here – my plan all along. They got fired up. The “Panopticism is creepy and terrible” group was at first reluctant; both they and the other group thought they’d gotten the raw deal. But little by little they began to see it differently: both they and the other group realized they’d actually lucked out. Because Panopticism does leave one with a cold, creeped out vibe – the relentless observation, disciplining, examinations, categorizations, systems refining systems so power is so embedded and invisible we have no idea it’s there. We click “like” and think we’re happy. We do, largely, what we are told. And so did my students.
Each group strove to come up with and divvy out arguments. Then they went at it. I have never before heard one of my students stridently cite “a surplus of power, always on the same side!” from this text and it made my nerd heart sing. It could have actually been a mini-documentary about the essence of our modern capitalist society. One group declaring, “Yes, they collect information on us all the time but it’s for our benefit, so we can have our healthcare system and our military and our schools” and the other saying, “There is no individual morality or individuality at all when everything is completely engineered and determined for us” and one side declaring “This is the only way we can have a good quality of life and ensure functioning and productivity” and the other side saying “But it’s all based on inequality, there is no real discipline for people in power” and one side insisting “Only bad people are subject to this system if they disobey” and the other side hurrying to counter, “Everyone is subject to this system!” and the whole room kind of hushed for a second realizing, oh crap, yeah.
It was great.
At one point someone gestured to me and said, “We may not want to be in this class, but it’s FOR OUR OWN GOOD!” to which I, although I mostly agreed with the Panopticism-as-dystopia side, was forced to agree.
The goal of these discussions is to deepen their understanding of the text, but more than that, it is for it to freaking matter. For their understanding of the universe to be scrambled, however briefly. “The mind that is not baffled is not employed,” Wendell Berry wrote. Before, I would have looked mainly for “competency,” whatever that meant. “Intelligence.” “Skill.” “Flourish.” Now I look for some blood-bone essence of why the heck we’re here on this planet in this society doing what we’re doing, and how can we make it better?
The two aren’t separate, or at war. But we mostly ignore the latter, thinking teaching can be largely an abstraction, an exercise in cool analysis that has nothing to do with what happens when we walk into the night and live the rest of our lives.
I draw the moon every morning as part of a diary I keep, and last night when I let the dog out I gazed up and realized I hadn’t even looked at the moon in weeks. Why study and practice a thing only to miss its essence? The knowing means little without the seeing.
After class on Thursday, I packed up, and I headed out into the blue chill of 5:30. I walked uphill to the pool to watch Elena’s swim practice. I began crafting this little essay in my head: it was a bit all over the place, mindfulness and doing unreasonable things and teaching and the power of the intangible, but I’d corral it in just enough. Not too much, not too tidy or it’d die of boredom. I’d string the sentences together, and imagine them traveling out into the world, their ideas blooming in other people’s minds, and I’d think of this great exchange: learning as an energy we transmit in equations, in words, in scientific experiments, in the joy of paying really close attention, together, to what is here before us, right now.
Recommendations:
We watched Women Talking and though I found it a little slow in places, I was weeping by the end and haunted by it for days. I LOVED Stories We Tell and it’s one of my favorite movies of all time. Overall, I just adore Sarah Polley and think she’s brilliant and someday I will get it together to buy Run Towards the Danger. I really enjoyed this On Being episode with Nick Offerman (who CRIED talking about his love for Wendell Berry! 😭) Pittsburgh friends, I’m going to this event tonight at White Whale – join me?) I have been in kind of a reading funk – starting novel after novel and not able to get into anything! Please, help me with some recommendations? What are you reading that’s weird, different, urgent somehow? Elena started reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and I am now counting down the days until we can see the epic-looking movie together.
A brief ask:
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Oh I loved this essay! (And I’ve always believed you are a good teacher, though the more one teaches, the better at it one gets!) Your ideas indeed blossomed in my mind ~ thanks!
Have you read The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea? One of my favorite novels—I'm about to re-read it. It's a family epic, a bit chaotic, very full of love.