Bronchitis 1999

22 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Sports, Work, Youth

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Bronchitis, DC, DMV, Duquesne University College of Education, Fear of a "Black" America, Pneumonia, Presidential Classroom, Silver Spring Maryland, Sleep Deprivation, Uninsured, Washington DC, Work Ethic Mythology

“The Colour of Phlegm,” June 22, 2019. (https://www.benylin.ca).

This summer marks 20 years since me and my wife of now more than 19 years moved down to the DC area, specifically Silver Spring. I had visited and lived in the DMV and in the Shepherd Park neighborhood in DC in the years between 1992 and 1997, mostly to visit friends like Laurell or Marya, for previous job searches, or to do my dissertation research. I lived in DC in 1995 for two months, between February and April 1995.

But other than a few days here and there, I hadn’t experienced the full onslaught of a DC summer until the summer of transition from Pittsburgh to DC and Silver Spring in 1999. I’d just accepted Presidential Classroom’s offer for the full-time gig as their Director of Curriculum, but was still obligated to teach my summer grad course in History of American Education at Duquesne University. Part of my obligation upon saying yes to the Presidential Classroom job was spending a week in DC with the high school students and with their instructors for the week, going around town to the key events of a week of civic education in Washington. It made sense that I would need to see programming at ground level before working on the curriculum and any new ideas I might have to improve it.

Although it made sense in theory, in reality, the job was a test of how well I’d perform with serious sleep deprivation and center-right White folk as my constant companions. I cleared my schedule in mid-June to be one of the instructors with the students. I should have cleared my lungs and sinuses for this part of my new gig as well.

I already knew from previous visits and stays that DC flora caused me some serious allergic reactions. In May 1994, I couldn’t breathe for five days, my nose was that stopped up. This was and remains the land of drained swamps and marches, after all.

Between that and a group of government workers turned barely trained instructors who went on benders night after night, I didn’t sleep. Between sinus issues and corn-fed high school juniors and seniors looking to make out and hook up in violation of the curfew during the week, I couldn’t sleep. Did I also mention instructors had to share a room? It was a small hotel room at the Georgetown University Medical Center Marriott. My roomie’s snoring made my own seem like I wasn’t breathing at all. I doubt if I averaged five hours of sleep per night that first week.

While going between sweating on the mall or in line at the Capitol or at the White House in 95 or 99-degree heat and being blasted with bus and Georgetown’s air conditioning, I picked up a head cold. Hanging out on the next-to-last night with the other instructors until 2 am didn’t help. Nor did chaperoning the farewell dance until 5 am the next night.

God Bless You cartoon, January 2013, February 26, 2013. (http://www.cartoonaday.com).

My head cold died down as I moved into my own room for a couple of days while going around town to find a place for me and my then fiancee to live once my Duquesne course ended and we could pack up to leave Pittsburgh. But it didn’t quite go away. I started to cough, sometimes out of nowhere and for no particular reason. On Wednesday before I had to leave to go back to the ‘Burgh to teach and begin the wind-down process for moving, I found a nice luxury apartment just over the DC border in Silver Spring. It was the so nice it made me want to cry. The staff seemed wonderful, if overdressed for daytime and maybe not quite there detail-wise. But I know I sounded like shit that triple-H afternoon.

It didn’t get any better the rest of the summer. I taught for five weeks with aches, chills, and a window-rattling cough that would stop my lectures for at least two minutes at a time while I waited for the coughing fit to subside. I have no idea what my students thought. That summer, I had a soon-to-be mainstream Black actor who talked way too much and a bunch of future and in-service teachers in that class. Really, they were probably more concerned about earning A’s than whether I passed out in the middle of class.

It occurred to me that I might have asthma, and that the cold I caught in DC had severely exacerbated it. Maybe I would’ve gone to see a doctor, that was, if I had any health insurance. Bronchitis, though, was far from my mind.

I assumed that all I needed to do was rest. But who could rest with a move coming up, starting a new job, turning in grades after grading papers, signing leases, buying engagement rings, and finding an agent for Fear of a “Black” America? That was my July and August 1999 when I wasn’t in the classroom earning my hacker’s license.

So I muddled through the heat of my fiancee’s apartment, the cold of Duquesne’s classrooms, the humidity of the DMV, the exertion of packing and moving boxes, and so many other things that summer. By the time I started working in the office at Presidential Classroom in Alexandria the third week in August, I was sucking Halls lozenges like they were orange-cream popsicles and I was six years old again.

Then, my future wife intervened. She correctly guessed that I had bronchitis and that I was on the verge of pneumonia. “You are not leaving this apartment! You are not getting out of bed!,” she said to me when I came home from work at the start of Labor Day Weekend. I didn’t have the energy to fight her, although I did whine, “What about our dinner plans?” somewhere in her bossing me around.

Well, I did leave the bed that three-day weekend, to go to the bathroom and to watch Tiger Woods win yet another tournament. Otherwise, hot soups, hot water, no air conditioning (my partner kept it off for me that weekend), VapoRub, a ton of Benadryl and Advil and NyQuil and Theraflu. Between Saturday night and Monday afternoon, I regularly coughed up the yellowest and greenest mucus I’d ever seen come out my body. My significant other would go, “Yuuuccckkk!” every time I showed her the concoction of sickness my lungs pushed out. In my head, I agreed.

I literally could have died 20 years ago. Seriously. Bronchitis and pneumonia are serious illnesses, even for the relatively healthy 29-year-old I was in 1999. The lack of health insurance and a single-minded commitment to getting out of Pittsburgh and academia, to finding a real job, made me sick. I was a half-dead man walking in August 1999. Another month like that could have killed me.

On Arrogance and Opinions

18 Saturday May 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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American University, Arrogance, CMU, Duquesne University College of Education, Evidence, Gender Bias, George Washington University, Howard University, Interpretation, Opinion, Personal Opinion, Pitt, Racial Bias, Racism, SETs, Student Evaluations, Student Evaluations of Teaching, UDC, UMUC

“No, fear and arrogance, you hayseed.” Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins characters in Bull Durham (1988), screenshot, May 18, 2019. (https://getyarn.io).

I received my latest evaluations from my AU students this spring. Really, I shouldn’t complain. Overall, my scores met or exceeded most metrics in all three of my courses this semester, even as some students thought there was “too much reading” or that I needed to “provide more guidance” on the readings I assigned. As an instructor, I have to sort of compartmentalize or even mentally toss out the personal attacks in such surveys. From students thinking I’m sexist because I used “#TimesUp” to get their attention after saying “Time’s up” multiple times during a small group discussion, to students saying I lack “emotional intelligence” because of email miscommunications (mostly on their part, though I took the blame) over a dramatic event. I’m hardly perfect, have never claimed to be, and expect that in dealing with human beings, especially young adults, that these things and their sometimes petty responses are bound to occur.

But some responses have been consistent across time and institution since my TAing days at the University of Pittsburgh. At some point since Fall 1992, a student or two will decide that I’m “arrogant” and that “[I] only care about [my] opinions,” that somehow, I never gave them room to express their opinions or somehow failed to validate their opinions. I don’t think I’ll ever overcome these critiques, nor should I try, especially after so many years of teaching. As the research has indicated for at least a decade, student evaluations of faculty are not reliable sources of data. Barely four out of 10 students at most colleges and universities will actually take the 10 to 20 minutes to complete one. Most negative evaluations correlate to an actual or an anticipated grade that is lower than what the student wanted for themselves in the course.

But the data for faculty of color, especially women faculty of color, and even more especially for Black women faculty, shows measurable racial and gender biases. Complaints about language, how one dresses, speech patterns, and other ticks and foibles become heightened. And not just among White students. Students of color, and Black students in particular, hold the Black faculty who have served as their instructors to a standard that could only be met by a parent of a newborn baby, something akin to perfection. I have felt this last bit during classes and other times at AU this semester more than others.

Still, on the broader issue of arrogance, I have changed my lecture style, the amount I lecture, the kinds of discussions I have run, the tactics for getting students to bond in the classroom, and (where I could) the types of readings I have assigned, just so students are more comfortable and willing to learn. None of this has mattered for the students who expect me to validate every idea they express in the classroom. None of this matters when I go in front of the classroom and lecture and facilitate discussion to this small but very vocal minority.

I used to think it was my age back in the 1990s. So I tried to be more objective, less animated, and gave up some degree of authority in the classroom. That worked for a couple of semesters at Duquesne College of Education and at GW. Mostly. But, even there, one student who told me day one she “hated history” and two students at GW wrote about my so-called classroom arrogance in their evals.

In teaching undergrads for a couple of semesters at the University of the District of Columbia and at Howard in 2006 and 2007, though, not one student had that issue with me. They didn’t complain when I poked holes in their analysis, or when I asked them to back up their opinions with evidence. It was refreshing, actually, to have students who didn’t assume that their opinions and that my years of interpreting and writing about history were equal in weight. Could it be that the racial dynamics of UDC and Howard made for a different interpretation of my demeanor and conveying of knowledge in the classroom (as one is a predominantly Black institution and the other is a flagship HBCU)? Probably.

Since my second year of teaching at UMUC, though, and with this first year at AU, this allegation of arrogance via my opinions has been constant with my evaluations, no matter how well students did and how positive my evaluations were otherwise. At this point, I have figured out a few tendencies of students who lodge this complaint. They are typically not comfortable with the material or with me as their instructor. I am frequently sarcastic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and gesticulate while using some of the skills I picked up from acting-as-public-speaking classes to lecture. In other words, lecturing with skill for me is a performance, one that conveys information, and it must be done with a high degree of confidence and seriousness, balanced with levity. That I have also decided to not treat history in a truly objective manner was deliberate, because history is a living subject, and thus cannot be taught objectively. Fairness and truth are far more important. That doesn’t make me arrogant. That makes me a confident instructor, but one with humanity and empathy.

As for opinions, I have sometimes said to my students, “As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes — nearly everyone has one.” That has usually gotten a few laughs (you gotta read the room before saying something like this — my AU students are too serious on the use of colorful language from what I’ve found so far). But even when I say that “this particular interpretation comes from me,” I am still expressing more than a personal opinion or insight. I am expressing an idea or interpretation based on years of study, observation, reading, and writing, for scholarly and mainstream publications. So when I insist on students backing up their opinions with evidence, or literally have to say, “No, that not correct,” and then explain why it isn’t, this is me doing the job of an instructor with years of knowledge and even expertise on a wide variety of topics, not just some random person on the Red Line train to Shady Grove.

Even with all of these caveats about the differences between opinion and interpretation, about my level of expertise, and about my approach to the classroom, there are some small number of students who will say, “He’s arrogant,” “He doesn’t value my opinion.” Or, as one student emailed me four years ago, “Sir, you are a dickhead.” I realize that these specific comments, like the ones I wrote about for The Washington Post last year about the rejection of Black history and racism as central parts of US history, were about my difference, not my indifference. Being a Black man teaching mostly White students, or teaching Black students who expect me to consistently validate their unsubstantiated opinions, does not have its privileges. Especially on a student evaluation form.

“Fear of The Unknown” or “Other” = Inhumanity

09 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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"Fear of the Other", "Fear of the Unknown", #AltonSterling, #PhiladoCastile, American Narcissism, Black Box, Dallas, Duquesne University College of Education, Empathy, History of American Education, Humanity, Inhumanity, Islamophobia, Racism, Southern and Eastern European Immigrants, Teaching and Learning, Xenophobia

A black box with question mark, a certain “fear of the unknown,” July 9, 2016. (http://socialcapitalmarkets.net).

The phrases “fear of the unknown” or “fear of the other” has been something that I’ve been familiar with as long as I’ve been in the classroom. So many essays, so many discussions, so many presentations where these stock phrases have greeted me in my capacity as instructor, professor, facilitator, administrator, and public speaker. Ultimately, the use of these all-too-often used phrases reflects the inability of the people who speak and write them to see other people as Homo sapiens, thus diminishing their humanity in the process.

The first time I seriously encountered either phrase, though, was in my second semester of teaching History of American Education in the College of Education at Duquesne University for MAT students. It was the fall of 1998, and I was teaching a required education foundations course (I was also doing Multicultural Education that semester). To be sure, there were a couple of veteran teachers who didn’t like having a twenty-eight year-old Black man telling them about the marbled history of their profession and the institutions for which they served as K-12 teachers. Some of their bigoted evaluation responses disclosed as much.

It was the week I lectured on the Southern and Eastern European immigrant experience in America’s emerging public school systems between roughly 1880 and 1930. In going through the efforts of educators to literally beat out of these children the language of their mother countries (e.g., Italian, Yiddish, Greek, Polish, etc.) while sorting them into lower intellectual tracks within public schools, I noted the anti-immigrant xenophobia among WASPs at that time. One of my students during discussion tried to explain it away as a WASP “fear of the unknown.” I asked, “What was the unknown? Were these immigrants aliens?” — in this case, I meant “extraterrestrials.”

Data Mining/Fear of the Unknown cartoon, Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News, July 6, 2013. (http://adamzyglis.buffalonews.com/2013/07/06/data-mining/).

The student didn’t really answer my question, as if “fear of the unknown” needed no explanation. But on the paper related to the experiences of the children of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, Black migrants, and working-class women, over and over again, the phrase “fear of the unknown” kept showing up. What made this use of phrase even more disappointing was an even more sobering Western Pennsylvanian reality. Most of my students were the descendants of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, some of whom were old enough to have had contact with grandparents who must have recounted their experiences with xenophobia in public education. That these students couldn’t possibly see the inhumanity of the phrase “fear of the unknown” made me question whether these current and future teachers should be in a classroom at all.

Luckily, I did manage to reach a few of my more skeptical students around these sorts of issues as this course progressed. After all, most teachers really do want to help their students. A couple even wrote me notes after slamming me in their evaluations about how my History of American Education course had opened their eyes to inequality and social reproduction in K-12 education.

Since then, I have remained keenly aware of when students, colleagues, public speakers, and fellow administrators (specifically in the context of the nonprofit world) have said or written the “fear of the unknown” or “fear of others” phrases. Mostly, it’s not in the context of White ethnics from an era in which “White” mostly meant “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” Over the past fifteen years, I’ve seen and heard “fear of the unknown” in reference to Blacks, Latinos viewed only as free-loading immigrants, and Arab-Muslim Americans as US-hating terrorists. There have been students who have justified the race riots of the not-so-recent past (the ones where White mobs stormed into Black neighborhoods and burned them out while maiming and killing Black men, women, and children) with the phrase “fear of the unknown.” Or co-workers who’ve explained away their xenophobia or homophobia as a natural “fear of the other.” Or public speakers who’ve explained Islam as if it were a magical black box that churns out terrorists the way Detroit used to turn out automobiles.

Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1594-96) , May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Stop it. Just stop it. What does “fear of the unknown” really mean? That you didn’t know that Black Americans were human beings with a need for work, education, housing, sleep, air to breathe, and food to eat? That you couldn’t conceive of Latinos as a group of folks who’ve been part of the American landscape (specifically Texas and the southwestern US) for far longer than there has been a US? That you can’t contemplate the idea that Arab Muslims have just as much right to exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly as any “red-blooded American?”

Using the phrase “fear of the unknown” says more about the people using it than it does about the “others” they attempt to describe as “unknowns.” All anyone really needs to know is that the so-called others are human beings. To say “unknown” or “other” means than you think you are superior to these “unknowns.” Or, conversely, that these “other” humans are not “normal,” that they are defective or not quite your equals. When groups of humans attempt to justify inequality or their fear with phrases like “fear of the unknown” or “fear of the other,” it means they have little or no empathy for the “unknown” or “other.” And when we as humans can cut ourselves off from other humans in this way, doesn’t that make us less humane, more “other” because we believe ourselves to be normal, even special, and therefore, better, than these “unknown others?”

Of course, there are tremendous psychological and material advantages to seeing other humans as “unknowns” and “others.” This week of #AltonSterling, #PhiladoCastile, and #Dallas has been proof positive of the value of some lives versus “unknown others.” The truth is, no Homo sapiens live in black holes. Unless those with the power to cut off empathy to their psychological and material advantage make a mental home for us there.

Middle School Teachers, Middle School Memories

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Algebra, Bad Teaching Habits, Duquesne University College of Education, Good Teaching Habits, Humanities, Humanities Program, Life Lessons, MCPS, Middle Schools, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Mrs. Mignone, Ms. Jeanne Longerano, Research, Science, Silver Spring Maryland, Sligo Middle School, Teacher Expectations, Teaching and Learning

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 19226, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 1926, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

There’s a reason why much of the recent research on middle schools has called for the elimination of middle schools long-term, that instead, K-5 or K-6 ought to become K-8. It’s a transitional period for kids, one that even with the best of parents, most preteens face mostly unprepared. It’s based on a system that educators and policy makers designed a century ago, when the average student completed their formal education in seventh or eighth grade (only one in five students living in the early twentieth century went on to high school).

The teachers traditionally prepared by schools of education really aren’t prepared specifically for sixth, seventh or eighth grade, but for secondary education. Meaning, teachers either have higher social and emotional expectations of 10-to-14-year-olds than they have prepared for, or they have higher academic expectation of their students than the students have been prepared for, or both. These are among the reasons why middle schools can easily become a black hole for students too young to be dealing with teachers trained really for high school, and a black hole for teachers who simply aren’t as prepared for tweeners and thirteen-year-olds as they like to pretend.

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Despite the advances in teacher preparation in the past couple of decades, this reality still exists at most middle schools, including my son’s Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. Common Core, PAARC assessments, a wide variety of fatty lunch options, all make students feel that education matters and yet it really doesn’t. My son has already had a couple of teachers whose first and second instinct for controlling their classrooms has been to yell early and often, to the point where I’m convinced that at least one of his teachers this year had Tourette’s (at least, until we had the school move him out of that class). At least two others could be accused of unconsciously labeling their students, as their expectations of their students have gone unmet.

Through meeting these teachers, I’ve re-recognized something that used to be wrong in my own teaching, back when I first started teaching in Duquesne University’s College of Education in the late-1990s. To have high expectations and standards of conduct isn’t enough. Teachers need to communicate it, through examples, through their lessons, through a rubric, quite frankly, and not just a laundry list of expectation. Simply put, given the age of the students, teachers need to positively and consistently encourage students to meet those expectations, and lay out why these expectations will help them, academically and practically.

I had precisely two teachers at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon, New York in the early 1980s who did exactly that. My eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Mignone, and my first-year, eighth-grade Algebra teacher, Ms. Jeanne Longerano were the best two teachers I had in two years of middle school Humanities-style. Both were committed to the idea that every student in the classroom deserved their undivided attention, which meant that we as students — even us fidgety ones — had to give our maximum preteen attention to what was happening in the classroom as well. Both had high expectations of us, academically and otherwise. I don’t think I got away with much of anything in their classrooms that 1982-83 school year, not even as much as scratching my pubescent balls because the hair was coming in that year.

I learned a life lesson about internalized racism and having high standards for human decency from Mrs. Mignone at the end of eighth grade. Not to mention, the applications of math to science, and science to history, which I carry with me to this day. From Ms. Longerano, I renewed my love for math, began my technical understanding of computer science (we had a computer science club that she started that year), and had a neighbor that I talked to from time to time. Ms. Longerano had given us such a strong foundation in Algebra that it wasn’t until AP Calculus in twelfth grade when I ran into any serious math troubles again.

In all, though, I had twelve different teachers in two years of middle school. I had an art teacher who was also the Humanities coordinator for A.B. Davis in Doris Mann who graded us on the quality of our art, “not just for trying,” to use her words. I had a seventh-grade science teacher whom I’d based some of the nutty stories I told my son over the years, about him eating raw clams in class or coming in after being sprayed by a skunk that same morning. I had a music teacher in Mrs. Mallory for two years who was flat-out goofy to the point of seriously immature, only to find out years later that she had done her same song-and-dance when she taught second-graders. I had a seventh-grade social studies teacher in Mr. Court who was the teacher who probably made his class the most fun, but not necessarily the most educational.

In contrast, Ms. Simmons (seventh-grade math), Ms. Fleming (Italian), and Dr. Demon Travel (eighth-grade social studies), were teachers who cared more about discipline and/or quick-and-dirty rote memorization than anything else. Simmons actually intimidated me, until one day near the end of the school year, I stood next to her. Only to find that I’d grown two inches, to five-foot-four, and that I was now at least an inch taller than her curly mini-fro. Mrs. Sesay, my homeroom and seventh-grade English teacher, was the opposite, a teacher who had little control over her classroom. Almost every incident of taunting and humiliation I experienced in seventh grade had its origins in 7S homeroom or English first period.

Still, I survived, mostly because of a crush in seventh grade, more maturity in eighth, and two really wonderful teachers in that latter year. I don’t want my son, though, to look back at his middle school years and go “Meh.” Unfortunately, he can already do that for sixth grade. Seventh and eighth will have to be better, even if it means I have to home-school him.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and My Own Prison

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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"My Own Prison" (1998), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, CMU, Creed, Dissertation, Dissertation Committee, Duquesne University College of Education, Foundation World, God's Lessons, Humble, Humiliation, Humility, Joblessness, Joe Trotter, Legacy, Mother-Son Relationship, Nonprofit World, Self-Reflection, Sycophants, Underemployment, unemployment

East Library branch of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, before (the version I worked in) and after renovation, October 4, 2006 and September 25, 2011. (http://popcitymedia.com and http://eastliberty.org).

On February 17th seventeen years ago, we opened one of the first community-based computer labs in the US at the East Liberty branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. What was once known as the Microsoft Library Fund (which later became the Gates Library Foundation, and then became part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) had provided the initial $110,000 to place this computer lab in one of the East Library branches resource rooms. I guess it could’ve been a proud moment for me. If I hadn’t earned my PhD the year before, only to face unemployment for three months during the summer of ’97 and underemployment in the five months since taking the Carnegie Library job. But this was a humiliating moment, not one of pride or, at least, taking comfort in a job done well. It was a learning moment at a time when I thought I already knew what I need to move forward with my career and life.

The dissertation process, my battles with Joe Trotter, the truth about my relationship with my Mom, had all taken a heavy toll on my heart and mind by the time Memorial Day ’97 rolled around. So much so that I lived between moments of humility (which is different from humiliation) and moments of rage in the sixteen months between May ’97 and the fall of ’98. I was living on fumes from my last Carnegie Mellon paycheck when I began working for Carnegie Library the day after Labor Day that year. I’d been conditioned, though, to think that everything happens for a reason. So I assumed that God was attempting to teach me a lesson, that I needed to give more out of the needs I had in my life in order for the things I thought I deserved to come my way.

John Wooden saying on being humble, February 16, 2015. (https://pbs.twimg.com).

There was a bit of a flaw in my logic around God’s lessons. For one, the idea that I wasn’t finding work in academia because I hadn’t been a giver was ridiculous. Between volunteering for soup kitchens, tutoring high school students, tithing at church, and so many other things, it was dumb to think that not enough humility was the reason I didn’t get the job at Teachers College or had trouble finding adjunct work in the fall of ’97. Or rather, it was dumb not to think that bigger issues — like my dissertation committee abandoning me when I needed them the most — played a greater role in my not finding full-time work in my chosen profession than any inability to serve others.

The Carnegie Library job provided a part-time stop-gap for my income while I attempted to figure out how to move forward without my advisor and my committee and move on with the knowledge that my relationship with my Mom would never be the same. I figured that the job gave me the opportunity to help others and to do good, and that it was a good first foray into the nonprofit world, especially with money from the world of Microsoft.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong! I had a co-worker who was jealous of my degree and attempted to undermine the work of putting together the lab and the class materials for teaching patrons how to use the computers at every turn. I figured out that the bosses at the central branch in Oakland had essentially pocketed some of the funding for the lab to cover the costs of new computers for their own personal use, and had underfunded both my position and my co-worker’s position as part of the grant.

Album cover for Creed’s My Own Prison (includes title track), released August 26, 1997. (Jasper the Friendly Punk via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws to illustrate title and theme of this blog post.

But I didn’t learn all of this until June. By February ’98, I began to realize that, more than anything else, I needed to free myself from my own prison of an idea, that I’d done anything wrong or sinful to end up running a computer lab project at twenty-eight when I had done much of this same work at nineteen years old. I had to begin to find prominent people in my field(s) to support me in finding work, even if none of them were on my dissertation committee. I still needed to apply for academic jobs, even if my status meant than some would reject me because of my issues with my advisor. I even needed to explore the idea of jobs outside academia, in the nonprofit and foundation worlds, where my degrees and my ideas about education policy and equity might still matter.

It definitely helped when Duquesne hired me in April to teach graduate-level education foundations courses in History of American Education and Multicultural Education. It helped even more, though, when I decided in August to quit the Carnegie Library job. Between the Microsoft folks and the sycophants at Carnegie Library who were willing to do almost anything for a few extra dollars — anything other than serve their neighborhoods, that is — I’d had enough of duplicitous people. Who knew that my first job with sycophants and Gates money would come back to haunt me in the seventeen years since!

Can There Ever Be Too Much Race In A US History Course?

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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African Slaves, Capitalism, Carnegie Mellon, CMU, Course Evaluations, Critical Thinking, Democracry, Duquesne University College of Education, George Washington University, History as Trivia, Independent Thinking, Native Americans, Pitt, Racism, Slavery, US History

ODing on chocolate via a hypodermic needle, January 5, 2015. (http://buzzfeed.com).

For nearly every semester in which I have taught a US history course — and I’ve been teaching them on and off since ’92 — one or two students have complained in their course evaluations that we “spent too much time on race.” Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington, UMUC, the refrain from this small but vocal minority has been the same. It was no different this past semester, as two students complained that there was too much about race in the course. But over the years, I’ve never seen any of these students ask themselves the question, “How do you define ‘too much race’ in a US history course?”

I guess I could look at it this way. That a small minority of my students like their US history the way most Americans like their churches — segregated and unequal. US history for them is supposed to be about the building of the greatest nation on Earth/in the history of humanity, preordained by God to dominate the world with its military, its capitalism and its brand of democracy. US history for them is the history of how Europeans escaped political persecution and religious oppression for the pristine wilderness of the New World, broke free of the chains of absolute monarchy and tyranny, and built this great country from the basement up.

John Gast’s Spirit of the Frontier (aka American Progress), with American personified by Columbia in a toga, 1872. (Jeff G. via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I guess I could teach a US history like this. A course that completely ignores the existence of Native Americans, numbering in the neighborhood of 10-15 million in what would become British North America (now the US and Canada) at the time of Jamestown settlement in 1607. A class that could gloss over the diseases, wars, starvation and constant encroachments that reduced this population by ninety percent within a century of the real British invasion. I could skip over the economic imperatives — really greed — that led to the use of White indentured servants and West Africans as indentured servants and slaves to make the colonies profitable through growing tobacco, rice and indigo. I could obfuscate the eventual creation of an institution that made permanent the connections between African skin and slavery in what would become the US, codified in law and in the US Constitution (albeit indirectly).

I guess this US history course could focus mostly on the genius of the great White men that made this a great nation, slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. I could then focus less on the crucial reliance of the US economy on the profits and products of slavery that made industrialization possible. A system that supplied the US and the UK with the cotton that would make modern capitalism — with its multinational banks, international commerce and movements of large numbers of people to cities for work — a reality. A system that so contradicted American ideals that it led to a civil war that killed and maimed nearly 1.2 million people.

Original Trivial Pursuit, Master Game, Genus Edition, 1981, January 5, 2015. (http://epicrapbattlesofhistory.wikia.com/).

And all this only gets us to 1865. There’s also Indian removal, Mexican-turned-Americans in the Southwest, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and Social Darwinism, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, race riots, Black migration, Mexican migration, Whiteness and the assimilation of White ethnics, the early Civil Rights Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the post-Civil Rights era. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the topics that are key ones in any US history course.

So short of deciding to only teach a US history that only focuses on great, rich White males, I have to discuss race. If only to teach this history properly and well enough to give all of my students food for thought and thought for food. Otherwise, I might as well be teaching Trivial Pursuit or change my name to Alex Trebek.

Students and the Joys and Travails of College Teaching

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Adult Learners, Ambition, Aspirations, Civic Education, College Students, Duquesne University College of Education, Enthusiasm, George Washington University, High School Students, Joy, JSA, Junior States of America, Motivation, Passion, Presidential Classroom, Teaching and Learning, Traditional College Students, Travails, UDC, UMUC, Undergraduate Students, University of Maryland University College, World Cup 2014 Final Pictures

Argentina’s Pablo Zabaleta lies on the pitch as Lionel Messi stands beside him after losing to Germany in the final, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 13, 2014. (Francois Xavier Marit/AP via http://usatoday.com).

Maybe not to that extreme, but there are circumstances where teaching a college course can be a joy or torture or even sometimes both at the same time. Some of this has to do with the actual nature of the course, some of it with my disposition, some of this with the types of students that walk through the door. But, in teaching somewhere around sixty courses since ’91, working with a civic education nonprofit and consulting with another one, I’ve found two large categories of students who have made teaching more enjoyable over the years, though not always an actual joy. One group has been graduate students, the other high school students aspiring for college.

There are a number of reasons why, of course. Some are pretty easy to understand. High school students aspiring to go to college or taking college-level courses are often ambitious and motivated, students who are amenable to learning. Graduate students often aspire to be better at their specific profession of study, which in my experience, has this group of students essentially aspiring to be some version of me. Even the brown-nosers in both groups tend to have the motivation necessary to be better students, or at least, to look like they’re better students.

It also has helped over the years that the several hundred high school and graduate students who’ve been in my classrooms have actually wanted to be there. Doing a week in Washington to learn how Capitol Hill really works, or a summer course at Princeton on AP US History or taking one of my undergraduate course over the years at the University of Pittsburgh, UDC and UMUC, those students (and their parents) made the choice to take those steps. Those students wanted to get into a college of their choice, to be well prepared, to make themselves better students, and perhaps even, better people.

History graduate students have choices, for the most part, in terms of which graduate seminars they take and in their specific cultural, geographic area and time period focus. In my experience teaching school of education courses, though, at Duquesne and George Washington University (courses like History of American Education, Multicultural Education or History of American Education Reform), the students I’ve taught in those courses chose to be there. They chose to read as many as eight books in eight weeks, to write term papers and research papers and do original research. Those students wanted to become better as teachers, as researchers, and in a few cases, to become college professors themselves.

Ready and waiting: 500,000 Germany supporters await the arrival of the country’s World Cup stars, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 15, 2014. (AFP/Getty via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/).

So what’s different teaching undergraduate courses with undergraduate students? Well, they’ve tended to complain the most about general education requirements, ones that require them to take a course in US or World History (my African American History students are generally happier about taking the course). But that’s not all. A fair number have treated me as their enemy, not as their professor or a teacher invested in their learning. Of course these students were in school to complete a degree. But college was no longer an aspiration. It was now a reality, with all of the responsibilities and complications that come with the five-year march toward a four-year degree. For traditional college-aged students, there have always been competing interests, the need to organize a life that involves working 15-20 hours per week and some semblance of a social life, and attempting to figure out a major (often not history).

With my adult learners, those pressures come from at least three directions. The personal pressure to perform academically, the workplace, familial and parental pressures, and the pressure of learning how to be a college student on the fly. Add to this mix the general lack of academic preparation for college for those over twenty-five. All of this has frequently led to a combination of insufficient motivation to learn — even when I’ve explained the “what’s-in-it-for-them” piece — and a quiet hostility toward the process of college matriculation. For this group as a whole — traditional college students and adult learners — aspirations can frequently turn into Being and Nothingness, or rather, a state of being and meaninglessness.

This mindset has been the most difficult aspect of my job as a teaching professor over the years. It’s somewhere between extremely hard and absolutely impossible to teach students whose minds have been closed to learning or self-improvement, whose idea of an education is a piece of paper and a rubber stamp. That most of those students who’ve made my work most difficult are undergraduates isn’t surprising, though. That’s part of the job.

Still, there are times where I miss those days when I taught or worked with high school students fully motivated to get into college, who already had a sense of where they wanted their lives to go. There are times when I miss a grad student angling for a higher grade or with a real interest in my writing and research. For better and sometimes for worse, at least they’re interested in the learning enterprise.