Confusion!

Okay, so last Wednesday might have been the highpoint of the term. This week has been all downhill. Ahhhh . . . rollercoaster.

Monday was our first day with Anzaldua. Here's what I had planned:

QW: Describe your reaction to this essay. What was the experience of reading it like? What struck you as significant? Where would you want to start our conversation?

Discussion

Then, pairs work on:
· What’s the project?
· What’s at stake?
· What writerly moves do you see here?
· How do the writerly moves relate to her project?

I am now using the same basic set of questions to discuss both the published readings and their own writing.

The conversation was, I guess in retrospect, fine. From their qws we talked about experiences of not knowing Spanish or of knowing Spanish. We talked about why Anzaldua would create these experiences.

Next, I asked them to get in pairs and work on the questions above. I sat with a pair group that included a student I have kept my eye on because he is giving off strong vibes of "I already know everything and don't need to put any effort in." I sat with them for an excruciating 25 minutes, making them accountable for what they said and posing questions that forced them to confront what they didn't know. Blah! (I will say, from the vantage point of Thursday, that Problem Student had a lot less attitude on Wed.)

Finally, we turned to whole group discussion about what they had discussed. It was a lively discussion. The confusion part was that the students were eager to throw around generalizations about "race" and ethnic groups. One of my more vocal white students said things like "it makes me feel sad that other people want to be white. We're not that great." And, "I'm white, so I don't have a culture." Good effing lord -- lots and lots of work for me! I talked about whiteness studies and white privilege and Sonia Sotomayor versus Sam Alito -- whose perspective is seen by a bunch of white men as differently dangerous? Luckily, the student who had prompted her to say the thing about everyone wanting to be white (he talked about his immigrant (Middle Eastern) family "whitewashing" themselves) corrected and challenged her. At one moment I realized we were in danger of talking about whites as a monolith and about the group that doesn't know Spanish as the monolith white. I talked about how significant social, regional, class differences cut across "race" and how people of color who don't know Spanish were being left out of our consideration. Problem Student then piped up angerly that "white" people can know Spanish. To which I responded that was of course true and tried to pull us back to thinking about how Anz prompted this whole discussion re: dominant culture (I phrase I like better since it gets us away from too facile generalizations about "race") and difference.

Messy messy day.