Tag Archives: Teaching and Learning

What Bull Durham and I Have in Common

18 Wednesday May 2022

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“Well, 247 home runs in the minor-leagues would be a…kind of dubious honor.”

Bull Durham, 1988.

Today marks two occasions, both of them a bit bittersweet. One, I marched and picked up my doctorate on this date, a quarter-century ago. A whole 25 years since my PhD ceremony, and my professional life has been a roller-coaster of betrayals, slights, and occasional triumphs since. I have written about all of them ad nauseum over the past 25 years, too. Learning people like my advisor and my mom were jealous of me was so discouraging that if it weren’t for writing, I might not be here at all to muse about anything.

But this May 18, in the year 2022, I have achieved a milestone I didn’t think possible, not even five years ago. Today, I begin teaching my second summer session course, US History from 1865 to the Present, at University of Maryland Global Campus. This is the 100th course I have taught or guest lectured as a regular since 1991. One hundred courses, enough to earn 2.5 bachelor’s degrees. “Yay, me!”, right?

This is a truly half-full, half-empty post, and so is how I feel about today. As Crash Davis would say, “Well, 100 undergraduate and graduate courses taught in academia’s minor-leagues is a kind of dubious honor.” It wouldn’t make news in The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, forget about The Sporting News! 

I mean, a full 58 of my courses have been taught at a University of Maryland campus that mostly offers online courses. American University, my primary teaching place for the past four years, laughs every time our adjuncts’ union brings up our want for a new contract to correct our paltry salaries (their latest offer barely enough for Chipotle dinner for four per course). I haven’t taught a course affiliated with graduate-level work since my Teaching Black Studies class at Howard University in 2007, and that was marginally so. I made more money managing my former bosses at the defunct Academy for Educational Development for eight years ($620,000) than I ever have in my 20+ years as a TA, instructor, or professor ($360,000). So yes, hitting my 100th course feels dubious.

News flash: it’s still an achievement, too. That means I’ve taught between 2,450 and 2,600 students off and (since 2007, mostly) on over the past three decades. At least a dozen of my students have gone to earn doctorates, at least another 200 have their master’s and JDs. I’ve written dozens of letters and provide references for scores of former students. I’ve had some amazing revelations and epiphanies while teaching, including on many of the topics I write about for income and publication now. And, though almost exclusively in the lowly position of “ad-junk,” have taught at Pitt, CMU, Duquesne College of Education, GW School of Education and Human Development, University of the District of Columbia, Howard University, and my two current campuses. I’ve also taught for two summers at Princeton, worked with students in civic education, and designed curricula and materials for various education organizations over the years. 

I’ve hit home runs, and against quality pitching, too. I’ve also hit threes out of double-teams, caught touchdowns while splitting double-coverages, and made blinding saves off of slapshots. In teaching as much as I have, I’ve had to. One TA in 100 courses, (and the one I did have should have never been trusted with grading responsibilities), one office (American) and two cubicles (Pitt and CMU, and I was a grad student then) in all my years in the classroom. I’ve taught students as young as 12 and as old as 80, too. Short of a mass shooter, I have pretty much seen it all as a postsecondary educator (though I’ve had armed cops as students in the classroom, too).

Really, I hope to remain an educator for the rest of my days, even as I hope that I’m not teaching eight, nine, and 10 classes per year for the next 20 or 30 years, either. For all the joys of light bulbs going off and seeing stereotypes shattered, there’s also the student sitting with their arms folded, refusing to listen, to me or their classmates, blaming me for everything wrong in the world. Crash Davis retired after breaking his record and became a coach in the minor leagues. That’s not so much a retirement as it is a significant role change. Maybe I can achieve the same, and soon.

What Remains in the Ashes…

05 Saturday Mar 2022

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Jacobi playing dead on dining room carpet, Silver Spring, MD, February 13, 2022. (Donald Earl Collins).

There are so many anniversaries I haven’t discussed over the past month. Just trying to make it week-by-week through being back in a classroom in-person, trying to teach groups of bratty, disengaged students while also wearing an N95 mask over a medical mask. It is torture, an emotional labor I wouldn’t wish on any of my nemeses. My students do not (and really, refuse to) understand the toll of having to teach in front of a group who complains about not going on field trips or couldn’t care less about oppression. All with their arms folded for two and a half hours at a time. If these were my first two courses as a professor, they would definitely be my last two courses as a professor.

That and our weak ass union at American has taken up a good deal of my February. To think the previous negotiators had only gotten our “liberal” employer to pony up a $25-per-course increase per year over three years. To know the whitemansplainers on American’s side of the table thought this was asking too much. To see how shocked my white colleagues were when they realized their well-reasoned arguments, their math, their impassioned pleas, their heartfelt stories didn’t matter. 

It all merely confirmed what I have known for years. Whites unaware of their white privilege will think themselves able to negotiate their way out of all jams and all forms of oppression. Except that white privilege does not mean socioeconomic privilege. And racial capitalism is a Ponzi scheme, a form of the Matrix too many white Americans have hooked themselves into. I had to allow myself the right of righteous anger, and the ability to call out these win-at-all-costs lawyers and shills for what they are, before any of my colleagues would say anything with a sense of anger themselves. Whiteness is a Matrix-level drug, and so is the narcissism that comes with it.

Several dates have come and gone since my last post. My significant other celebrated her 55th. My sister Sarai would have been 39 years old on February 9th, that is if the scourge of sickle cell anemia didn’t exist. Toto’s “Africa” peaked at #2 on the Billboard Pop chart in February 1983 also. (I was in eighth grade, reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle at the time.)

Yesterday marked two milestones. One was the 40th anniversary of a crush-turned-love for me, on the wings of Ballerina Wendy (I am truly a goofy romantic). Two, it’s been two years since I taught a course in-person and maskless, the last time I felt mostly “safe” in public (truth is, with everyday racism, I have never felt truly safe). I am not sure I will ever feel either of those ways again — March 1982 and March 2020 seem like different timelines that someone who was sorta me walked once in my dreams.

What feels painfully real about the pandemic is the distrust I feel toward humanity these days, not counting my partner, my son, and my dog (and in his case, he sniffs too many disease-carrying turds for me to trust his in-stink-ts). It’s been more than 20 years (February 2002) since I did a family intervention to reach out to my mother and my siblings about being honest about where we were as a family and how we ended up with the poverty and abuse we all experienced growing up. 

I have given up on having the kind of adult relationship a 50-something Black man should be able to have with his 70-something mother. Maybe being only 22 years apart in age, and witnessing so many of her failures and her small triumphs has been too much. Then again, refusing to admit she caught COVID, and that her church friends died from COVID, and refusing to get jabbed with a COVID vaccine, all based on vanity and willful ignorance, has completely worn me out.

I have mostly given up on having the kind of adult relationship a 50-something Black man should be able to have with his four brothers ages 54, 42, 40, and 37 (my door remains open for them, but just). The longest conversation I have had with Darren since 2002 was maybe ten minutes total. My younger brothers admitted during the intervention in 2002 they were jealous of me. That, unfortunately, has not changed over the past two decades. They don’t return my phone calls or my texts. They don’t respond to my Facebook posts on their timelines, or my LinkedIn messages. Of course, at least one of them refuses to vaccinate, and would prefer unemployment instead. Their job prospects in recent years have made them bitter, especially toward me. If they only knew the extent of labor exploitation in higher education and in the writing world. But they would still be jealous anyway, I suppose.

I need no one to tell me how blessed I am overall. I have reinvented myself into the person I always was.  I still make good trouble for my benefit and (hopefully) the benefit of others. My own family life remains good. I can only hope what remains in the ashes will rise again, for me and my own family, even for the flea-bitten dog.

I’ve Been An Educator for 30 Years

05 Friday Nov 2021

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Me with my old Duquesne University ID, where I taught in 1998 and 1999, May 2017. (Donald Earl Collins)

It’s a bittersweet anniversary for me. Thirty years since the first time I was in a classroom as an instructor. Thirty years of providing professional development advice (because I assisted with undergraduate advising of history majors in 1991 also). Thirty years of traveling this path, whether in higher education, the nonprofit world, or as a consultant. Thirty years of being seen as “less than,” of exploitation, of disappointment, of disrespect, regardless of my degree status or age or how I dressed. Thirty years of the occasional thanks or pat on the back for a job well done. Thirty years. Maybe too long for a person who should have always put being a writer first.

It was the first Thursday in November 1991 when my advisor Larry (Laurence Glasco) had me run his brand-new course for one evening, History of Black Pittsburgh. It was one of my elective courses toward my MA in History degree, an easy-A in the midst of two core courses, third-semester Swahili, and a primary research paper project on the intercultural education movement. I had fully-charged Energizer bunny energy back then.

Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh was an evening block course, which at the University of Pittsburgh meant that it met from 5:45 to 8:10 pm. The class met in one of the auditorium-style rooms in David G. Lawrence Hall. The object that evening was for the class to watch and then discuss/critique the documentary “Wylie Avenue Days.” It was a film about the cultural heyday of the Lower and Upper Hill District, Black “Picksburgh’s” mecca from the 1920s until urban renewal wiped out the Lower Hill to build a sports arena in 1958. The film, though, continued through the 1960s, when somehow, the remnants of the Lower Hill did not explode in uprising and riot after MLK’s assassination, but marched in massive protest instead.

I was terrified of the idea of being in front of any classroom in 1991. But with 15 of the 35 students in the course over the age of 35 — and some old enough to have met and have known the people who were in the film — my stomach did flips in the days before I had to run the class. Larry sensed this, I think, which was why he gave me this assignment to begin with. “You’ll do fine, Donald” was the only thing Larry said to me about guest lecturing that day.

Looking back, it was a pretty easy assignment. The documentary took up an hour by itself, and with a ten-minute break, all I really had to do was facilitate discussion for an hour. No big deal.

But it was a big deal. With about 20 traditional college-aged students (mostly Black, with a few brave white Yinzers), the older students would dominate the conversation about “Wylie Avenue Days,” about meeting jazz artist Billy Eckstine or swooning over Lena Horne, about how the clubs were “integrated” every Saturday night between “6 pm and 6 am.” They also discussed the need for community reliance and self-sufficiency, because shopping for clothes “dahntahn” at Horne’s, while not Jim Crow illegal, certainly could get Black Picksburghers in trouble.

We also had retired Pittsburgh Courier correspondent Frank Bolden in the classroom that night. Larry had Bolden as a guest speaker earlier in the course. Bolden would show up on occasion and just hang out and add a story here or there to provide a living perspective on something that would otherwise only be a footnote in a newspaper article or a book. Bolden was in his eighties by this time, so he had a lifetime of stories.

With so many older students and guests in the audience, I barely had to ask any questions at all. My main challenge was to find a way to get the younger students involved, but after a couple of quick comments, I realized that it was better for them to listen and learn than for me to run a more typical and less free-flowing discussion.

The older students were extremely respectful. They kept calling me “Mr. Collins” or “Professor,” even though Larry and I had told them I was just a first-year grad student. “Don’t pay that no never mind,” one of the other students said. “You up there, you a professor.” And then they kept talking about the good-old days, the sense of community on the Lower Hill, and then, the end of it all because of urban renewal and eminent domain.

The class went over by ten minutes, and the younger students began to leave. But a core group of about 10 of the students and Bolden stayed until after 8:30. The last of us didn’t leave until after 9. “Larry, I have to admit, this was fun,” I remember me saying afterward, before catching a bus back to East Liberty and home.

I have TAed for or taught 95 standalone classes in the 30 years since, helped run a national social justice and leadership development project and a national education reform project, and have directly and indirectly worked with thousands of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students since. There have been more good days than difficult ones, and more than a few great discussions and wonderful times with the 2,500 students I have taught directly. 

I must thank Larry for the opportunity, and for allowing me to use his class and classroom as a way to break out of my shell, to get over my social anxiety and other insecurities about being in front of fickle crowds. And yes, students, especially the younger ones, are a fickle bunch, more jaded these days than in the 1990s. I wonder why…

Will I do this thing called teaching another 30 years, just like Larry is still doing? I do not know. If I am doing this into my eighties, I would have to be able to teach the courses I want to teach, not the courses I am assigned or the courses that I’ve designed but are picked apart by the affluent and white who may be a little uncomfortable with my critiques of the rich and powerful, of the capitalistic and the racist. Especially as I have added American narcissism to these critiques. Ha! Here’s 30 years!

Having a Fake Ass ‘Mick Hucknall’ as a TA

23 Thursday Jul 2020

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Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, circa 1989. (https://pinterest.com via Rolling Stone)

I have talked quite extensively about the nature and evolution of my own teaching, about the best and worst teachers I remember from K-12, about my profs and their teaching (or lack thereof) more than a little bit while on this blog. But, outside of Paul Riggs, I have not written much about TAs and the good, bad, and ugly there. I haven’t really discussed my own times as a TA, except to point out the pushback I’d sometimes had to deal with from students, the emasculation I had to deal with from my professors who “supervised” me.

Trying to learn how to teach and evaluate students while taking grad-level courses and preparing for oral exams, writing dissertation proposals, doing conference presentations, writing the occasional publication, and serving as a gofer for professors working on their own projects is overwhelming. Add the personal and familial to it, and it’s a wonder than anyone who isn’t from a family with a net worth of at least half-a-mil still decides to earn an advanced degree and teaches along the way. And all for less than peanuts, not even close to a living wage.

All of this is context for my one-time TA from my Existential Philosophy course from Spring 1989 at the University of Pittsburgh. You see, he was the polar opposite of the professor who taught this course. The newly-minted PhD and assistant professor for Existential Philosophy (and soon to jump ship for Georgetown that year) was a dynamic, exciting, and insightful thinker in his mid-30s, one who could take the thickest philosophical text and break it down for even students who didn’t care about the philosophical at all. The sandy-blonde version of the lead singer for Simply Red, by comparison, was boring beyond belief, and could make even the most obvious interpretations of Nietzche, Kierkegaard, and Camus sound like some theoretical mathematics he barely understood and could hardly articulate. It made our required discussion sections on Thursday afternoons a form of torture.

Mr. Australian version of Mick Hucknall, though, also had an agenda, the kind that most progressives would call problematic in 2020. He reined it in somewhat most Thursdays, but on at least two of our days, he couldn’t control himself. It didn’t really matter what the topic was, but frequently the TA would turn the discussion toward anti-theism. This was more than just atheism. One can certainly not believe in God for themselves and still respect those who do. But anti-theism is more along the lines of a Christopher Hitchens or a Bill Maher, people who love to loathe higher-power worshippers, with bits of Islamophobia and racism thrown in.

An example of fake-ass Simply Red’s behavior, courtesy of Boy @ The Window

He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and said as much. I was ignored.

But it wasn’t just the ideological bent that was obvious in this discussion section. It was the racial component. Me and the other three Black students in the section — all three were Black women — were usually quiet when sandy blonde Mick Hucknall described religion as “nonsense.” But the White students who were anti-theists chimed in like they had been suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church’s Inquisition for the past 500 years.

One class in March was really awful. It was after the professor had lectured about Kierkegaard and the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in his consideration of Abraham’s moment of decision between obeying Yahweh and killing his five-year-old son Isaac or not. Right from the start of our 50 minutes, the TA went after religion like he literally hated worshippers. He referred to monotheists as “fools” and “crazy.” The White students talked about “not putting up with religious oppressors anymore” and being “tired of [us] flaunting our Christianity in their faces.” If it had been even a year later in my education, I probably would have gone directly to the professor or the Philosophy department about this very biased form of education occurring in this classroom.

I was so glad when I didn’t have to be in sandy-blonde-Simply-Red’s discussion section anymore. But that wasn’t the last time I saw him. For at least two years afterward, I’d see him on campus, usually outside Hillman Library or the Cathedral of Learning taking a drag on a cigarette, and he recognized me, but never said hello (thank God). But, after I began grad school at Pitt, the aging fake Mick Hucknall didn’t seem to recognize me at all.

It was interesting that as I got older and made more steps to my PhD, his run toward his own must’ve stalled. The last time I saw him at Pitt was in 1998. I overheard him complaining to another grad student about his committee still not ready to declare him done with his dissertation. As burned out as I was from my own dissertation process, at least I was already done.

At that moment, I thought about saying, Ain’t karma a bitch? But I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t see the point. The golden rule of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” applies to the just and the unjust, the believers, the non-believers, and even the anti-believers. Or, to quote Simply Red, “I, oh I, oh I, I’m gonna do the right thing.” Still, a bemused smile did make its way on my face, because he was such a terrible instructor, and likely one who had traumatized hundreds of students over the years.

A List of the Unwritten Rules I Wish I Had Known, in 1990, 2000, and 2010

19 Tuesday May 2020

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Me, 23 years after my PhD graduation, May 18, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

As a confessed educated fool, I readily admit that there are a ton of things I understood but did not act on. But I also know that there are solar system loads of unwritten rules that I didn’t and couldn’t possibly have known going into my professional future toward the end of my undergrad days at the University of Pittsburgh. And, there’s the stuff that falls in between. The rules that are not hard rules, ones that can be bent, twisted into pretzels, and/or broken or even shattered. The things that I didn’t know I knew, the ideas and principles that are ingrained or splinters in my mind, but not quite accessible until the moment I needed them, or, even worse, right after I really could’ve used that extra bit of knowledge and wisdom.

This list is merely the beginning of the most important rules I could impart to my younger self, at 20, 30, and yes, 40 years old. Donald’s 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5 all believed that his mind, his imagination, his hard work and achievements would all carry the day, would win him a slice of prosperity, a sliver of intellectual respectability, a piece of popularity, even. All to have moments and flashes of all three, but not usually at the same time, and all to realize that talent and hard work for Black folx in a Whiteness world matter not. Not even among most Black elites. I could list 1,000 unwritten rules and other ideas that I wish I had known or — if I did somehow already know — taken advantage of. But the real theme here is that the meritocracy is a lie. Whether in the form of rugged individualism or a belief in K-16 education as a social mobility equalizer, merit through talent and hard work is an American mythology like Abraham Lincoln “freeing the slaves” and America as always good and righteous.

1. You are a writer. Whatever the job, whatever the career path, whatever the familial and relationship and marital responsibilities, you are a writer. Yes, despite it all, your calling is to write about it all. Period. It does not matter if you think most of your writing is crap. All writers think their writing is crap. It does not matter if you’re really good at organizing conferences, retreats, and learning institutes. Or, if you are excellent at curriculum design, a tough but caring history and education professor, a science nerd and a talented computer science geek. Nearly every writer has another set of jobs and careers besides writing. Just because your co-workers, colleagues, and even family might not see you as a writer first, does not mean that you are not a writer.

And, here’s the real deal. Not everyone needs to know that you are a writer. Some dumb muthafuckas will use your expressed calling against you, especially if and when they do find out about your creative side and your one troy ounce of success. Some of your enemies, nemeses, and family members and friends will literally laugh in your face when you discuss your aspirations with them. You have to know whom to trust and not trust with this truth about yourself. You will learn, in time, to keep your own counsel, to not let everyone in your world in on your not-so-secret secret.

And you will learn that to write is not just putting pen to paper or fingers and thumbs to a MacBook keyboard. It’s reading, beyond the academic tome, beyond the occasional novel or Walter Mosley detective mystery. It’s reading folx who’ve struggled with writing just like you. It’s people-watching on trains and the Metro. It’s listening in Univision or Telemundo programs while folding clothes at a laundromat with a mostly Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Nuyorican or Dominicanyorka audience. It’s thinking of an idea while cleaning chicken thighs for dinner or on the occasions you end up jacking off for lack of sleep. It’s all the vivid dreams and nightmares — really, visions — that you’ve had of present, future, past, past-future, future-present, and ever-present, about escape, about overcoming, about being trapped. That’s all a part of the process.

2. Degrees matter, and yet, degrees don’t matter for shit. I cannot believe that your dumb-ass self believed for years that getting the “PhD would be a passport for doing what [you] wanted to do in [your] life.” You must have said this to 50 of your closest friends, acquaintances, and even a couple of folks who you eventually realized were your enemies back between 1990 and 1997. At your most stressed times, those sudden, bolting-upright-in-the-bed-at-3am moments, with your heart thumping like you were Bugs Bunny ogling Lola Bunny, you believed the doctorate was the ticket. You kept telling yourself this, even as you had doubts about what the degree meant as you finished your coursework in 1994. You cast yourself atop this hill, especially after becoming a Spencer Dissertation Fellow in 1995, even though you and many in your cohort were all obvious misfits in the grad school system.

Yes, in the narrow sense of job qualifications, degrees matter. But, you earned your master’s degrees in History in April 1992. At 22 years old! You were all-but-dissertation at 24. 24! You could’ve taken time off, earned a teaching certificate in a year, gone on to teach at public, private, or parochial school, or even earned a degree in a more practical field, like psychology, social work, education, journalism, creative nonfiction, or sociology. So admit it, damn you! You were attracted to some aspects of the tenured faculty lifestyle. Not most of it, to be sure. Yet the idea of having a schedule where you spent lots of time doing research and writing. You secretly craved being paid to write whatever you wanted to write. Even though you already knew that you could only do this if you willing to write like a cold, dispassionate White guy well-off enough to not care about reaching an audience outside of his extremely narrow field.

So you convinced yourself for nearly two decades that you could do and be both. A writer for mainstream organs and readers and a writer for academe. You weren’t wrong. Your eclectic writing style can accommodate complex scholarly ideas and personal tales and dramas, even creative techniques to transition between them. But the world of the privileged rarely allows for the crossover-dribble equivalent for writers. With a doctorate, you are an egg-headed scholar to the average editor, and cannot possibly write in any other way. For journal editors, your style was never gonna be scholarly enough. For newspaper and magazine editors, your style was always too cerebral. And, despite your degree, you had a hard time convincing others of your expertise. You only earned a PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University, okay? Not from UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford, or certainly not from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or even UPenn, Georgetown, or Columbia. Your years of published works and a couple of self-published books would be barely enough to convince Ebony to take a look at your work when you hit your mid-40s. Forget about trying to bifurcate and make your degrees work for you. Get a good job, and just find more and more ways to keep writing, and hopefully, you won’t be dead before people start reading your stuff.

3. Academia, the nonprofit world, and the writing world only make room for Blacks and other people of color when then either completely conform to its -isms (tokens), or when we prove ourselves to at least be moderately successful mavericks. There is no in between, there is no best-of-both-worlds, or straddling the fence, or finding yourself as the Emissary that can cross between worlds. You are not Avatar Aang, the Last Airbender or Captain Benjamin Sisko of DS9. Even among other Black folks, like when I was offered a tenure-stream position in the Department of Africana Studies (née Afro-American Studies) at Howard University in 2000, it came with the implicit stipulation that I needed to conform, to always respect my elders — no matter how elitist and exclusionary I thought they were. At nearly every job I have held since 1996, I have been hired as a token toward diversity with the added benefit of my degree and/or specific expertise, or because I went against the grain to do or write something counterintuitively.

But if that were all, you may have figured some aspect of this out during the Reagan years. The layers of intersectional elitism, from whole institutions like lily-White, College Republican, and two-comma-kid Carnegie Mellon, to department-level beliefs of assuming that you as someone who grew up with poverty would somehow survive summer after summer without financial support. There were also the professors, who to a person assumed that “a few years of hazing will be good for you,” as if you grew up without a material care in the world. After all, how could a Black guy from Mount Vernon, New York with your familial and socioeconomic background find themselves in the hallowed halls of major universities?

Yeah, man. There are almost as many layers of elitism in the working world as there are folds in the gray matter of an alleged Mensa genius. Racial paternalistic elitism, neo-Marxist elitism, misogynist elitism, Marxist elitism, socialist elitism, misogynoir elitism, White feminist elitism, Afrocentric elitism, corporate elitism, technocratic elitism. There’s also Ivy League elitism, HBCU elitism, country-club elitism, affluent Black elitism, African Black elitism, Afro-Caribbean elitism, Puerto Rican elitism, and biracial elitism. And lest I forget, there’s that from-the-5-boroughs-New Yorker elitism, served-in-the-Peace-Corps elitism, revolutionary elitism, anti-revolutionary elitism, and even contrarian elitism. Cutting through all these layers over several decades might leave you in a rage, ready to holler at a moment’s notice, and with some bouts of exhaustion and high blood pressure. But the truth is, none of these dumb asses know how deep in The Matrix they are, putting on enough airs to crush entire cities into oblivion.

4. You will have moments of serious doubt. You will have days, weeks, months where you will be depressed. You will have “waiting for the other shoe to drop” emotions, even when everything is going well professionally. You will feel that you do not belong. Not in academia. Not in the nonprofit world. Not as a writer. Not as an American. Sometimes, not even as a Black American. You will have bouts with what we call imposter syndrome. And yes, you do not fit in easily anywhere, because you have spent so much of your life trying to learn how to cope in places and spaces that never wanted you. Your experiences with millennialist religions, with poverty, with Blackness, with growing up in Mount Vernon/New York City, will help you cope. But you will never be a fit in any place you inhabit in this lifetime.

And, you need to know that this will be perfectly fine. Fitting in never brings you the material and psychological benefits you will seek for yourself and your loved ones. Fitting in only brings you headaches on the regular, endless cycles of diarrhea and constipation, a nearly permanent insomnia. Fitting in makes you almost forget your training as an African American historian and your expertise in understanding the human condition. Fitting in nearly kills the writer you so desperately need to become before you even fully acknowledge that you are one.

So, do not ever fit in. Do not even try. Be you. Be your best you. If that isn’t enough, that’s the problem of a world full of bullies, Head-Negro-in-Charge micromanagers, White moderates, paternalistic White women, and other who would prefer brown-nosers to free thinkers. Not to mention, the armies of sycophants these assholes tend to hire.

So, the meritocracy is a neoliberal lie, and a debt-ridden deadly one. You might never break through as a writer in all the ways that matter to you. Or you just might. Or, you may fully break through, only to find out that you are so much more than the writer you will eventually become. But do not look for approval. Especially not from the US academic and literati set. Let them continue to eat their shitty cake.

My Thoughts on Cut-Throat Finals Week

17 Tuesday Dec 2019

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Death Race (2008) Dreadnought scene screen shot, December 17, 2019. (https://youtube.com).

I have seen some shady shit as a student and educator over the years. Between my middle school and high school magnet programs in Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon, my four years as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, my three years of grad school course work at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon, and my years of contingent teaching, I have seen students do everything short of killing me or killing their classmates for a higher grade.

This semester provided some new wrinkles (really, old wrinkles I haven’t seen since my Humanities days in the 1980s) that actually shocked me. All as I taught my 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th classes in my roller-coaster of a teaching career. I have felt a certain way toward some of my most demanding, hold-my-hand-for-an-A, spoiled-brat students over the years. This semester, I found myself actually despising three in particular across two universities and four classes. By no means does my grading reflect what I think of them, as I assigned each of them the grades they earned. But really, there is no letter in the alphabet low enough for them that I could assign. At least, one in which I would ever feel fully satisfied. And that is all because they all made the decision to be cut-throat, toward me and toward their peers.

I fully understand the compulsion. Six years in a magnet program that was one part Benetton commercial and three parts Death Race — the Jason Statham version from 2008 — showed me George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a live-action drama set from 1981 to 1987. Students giving each other incorrect notes from which to study. Classmates telling each other they were going to fail a final, or that they didn’t belong in Humanities. One Class of ’87 star making sure to say to another that they were only getting into an elite school because they were Black.

Hazing, bullying, torture, ostracism, denigration were all part of my experience, and that was before we started taking AP courses! I even snickered when our valedictorian received a 67 on an English essay in 11th grade because she failed to underline the title of a James Baldwin book (either Go Tell It on the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, who can remember such mundanity nearly 34 years later). We became good friends for a while after high school — go figure!

So, it’s not like I couldn’t conceive of setting up a classmate to fail, using someone else’s better words to substitute for my gross and imperfect writing, or spending money to hire a tutor to study for an AP exam. I could’ve really done it, if I had the will and/or the wealth. I just wouldn’t do it. You know, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s in Matthews, the first book of the Gospels in the New Testament. It’s one of the few tenets that I have tried hard to follow in all my years as a human being and as a Christian. (The tenets I follow consistently are universal ones, so please do not get your atheistic drawers all twisted.)

But not always. During finals week my second semester at Pitt, at the end of April 1988, I put that Golden Rule aside, and for good reason. During our two-hour, multiple-choice final exam in Roman History, I noticed him. A skinny, geeky White yinzer with dirty blond hair sitting behind me in the Cathedral of Learning lecture hall on the ground floor. I noticed him because I heard him, somewhere around the question 70 mark. The only time his pencil made a noise was after I had filled in a bubble with an answer. By question 75, I knew the dumb mf was cheating off my answer sheet.

Denzel Washington’s character putting corkscrew to throw/soft palate/brain cavity, The Equalizer (2014), December 17, 2019. (https://imdb.com).

So I did what my years in Mount Vernon and in Humanities had trained me for. I proceeded to answer the next 25 questions on this 100-question exam incorrectly on purpose. It was rich and dripping with caramel-chocolate-on-ripe-strawberries revenge! I knew every correct answer and just kept bubbling in one wrong one after another. And as sure as dog-shit peppering dirty snow piles on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in February, Mr. Yinzer bubbled in his answers right after mine.

Then, I stopped. I paused for a half-minute after bubbling in question 100. I picked up my big eraser, and frantically rubbed out my incorrect answers to each of those last 25 questions. Then I turned around, and gave the yinzer a “Gotcha!” look. He was pissed and scared, his face the pale color of white pastel paint mixed with water. I turned back around, and carefully bubbled in my correct answers for the last quarter of the exam.

After I got up to submit my exam to the professor, I walked up the steps toward the back of the lecture hall, passing Mr. Yinzer along the way. He shot me a look, one where he knew he was caught, like a rat in an old-style trap, about to die from the pain of asphyxiation and a broken neck. I rolled my eyes with the thought, That’s what you get, dumb muthafucka!

I am not proud of that moment. Sure, the yinzer deserved it. But, I could’ve reported it to the professor. I could have just covered my answer sheet up better. I could have confronted the student directly. I could have even let the student ride my coattails toward an A on his final exam. Instead, I went all cut-throat and ensured that this student failed his final. In what way am I really better than him when I helped an academically drowning classmate swallow more water while holding his head down?

I know. What I did may seem milquetoast on the scale between blatant cheating and the viral slut-shaming of a peer with whom you are in academic competition. But that’s the point. None of this should be acceptable. My A in the course would not have changed, and Mr. Yinzer would still have struggled academically even if had succeeded at cheating on this one exam.

At just 10 days before I turn 50, I have figured out what I hate, actually hate, about other humans. I hate habitual liars, especially the ones who regularly lie to themselves while telling me their lies. I hate elitist assholery, even from those whom I admire, even from among my friends. I hate cheating, and those who think they can get away with it. I hate brown-nosing, as I smell this shit from a mile away. Now, I despise those who would eat A’s and A-‘s for their three squares a day before recognizing that education is about much more than a high grade an a job to pay off their student loans. Education is about freedom, having and making good choices, and finding yourself a crew that you can rely on and can rely on you long after graduation. Those who think otherwise are as lost as Dr. Manhattan caught in a quantum vortex.

When I Choose The Wrong Book For a Class

09 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Screen Shot of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), by Dinaw Mengestu, November 9., 2019. (https://target.com).

Yes, I’m back! After two months of grading, writing, pitching, grading, revising, pitching, and more grading, though I’m not sure I’m ready to be back, but I have things to get down on here anyway.

I have taught eighty undergrad and grad-level classes since 1996, and been a part of more than 90 high school, college, and graduate classes as a guest lecturer, TA, instructor, or professor since 1991. I have definitely made more than my share of mistakes in the classroom. Miscounted the number of students to split into small groups. Occasionally quipped in New Yorker-sarcasm English to my Midwestern or Southern-raised students, not exactly endearing myself to them. I have miscalculated grades, posted an electronic announcement to one class when it was meant for another. But, on historical context, historical content, storytelling, use of materials, the substance and guts of courses, I can honestly say I do not allow myself to make egregious errors.

Now, that does not mean that I haven’t inherited errors from courses that others had taught or haven’t been hamstrung with mediocre materials and textbooks that my previous institutions (and one current one) have said were just fine for my students over the years. This is about my unforced errors.

This semester, in my Washington, DC class (the full title is Washington, DC: Life Inside a Monument, a terrible title, really) at AU, I made one all-time error, one in which I should take 60 percent of the blame. I chose a book for the course based mostly on a couple of recommendations from colleagues, a Washington Post review of the best books on DC and the DMV, and an admittedly quick skimming of the first 15 pages. It was Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a historical novel about the lonely and isolated experience of one Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant living in Logan Circle, set some 17 years after his escape from the Ethiopian Civil War (roughly 1996 or 1997).

I picked it ultimately because there are precious few books about any aspect the DC immigrant experience, much less one about the history of Black and Brown immigrants in the area. The problem was, I decided to read the book — one month into the semester, that is. Once I dug in, I started having flashbacks of my AP English class with Rosemary Martino, where we spent the better part of three months reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Mengestu’s Sepha was not lonely, apathetic, and dyspeptic merely because he was a thirtysomething stranger in the strange land of the US, of DC, of Black DC. I’m more than sure that loneliness and isolation are an inevitable consequence of leaving one’s home country and family behind for another country in another part of the world. But no, most of Sepha’s isolation was self-imposed. For 17 years, this man lived in a predominantly Black part of DC, in the midst of a nascent Ethiopian residential and business community within walking distance of his apartment and corner store, during the heart of the Marion Barry years. Yet he only has two friends, one from Kenya, the other from the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Really?

What was worse was once the White character Judith and her biracial daughter Naomi moved into Logan Square at the height of Sepha’s deepening self-loathing and depression. Judith apparently bought a mansion-turned-broken-down-addict hangout across the street from Sepha, and spent a significant chunk of change fixing it up for upper-middle-class habitability. Sepha becomes enamored with the two of them as they began to frequent his falling-apart store. He becomes sort-of-friends with Judith, and sort-of-a-father-figure to Naomi.

There were at least four times between pages 52 and 120 where I put down the book out of sheer frustration with the plot, the characters, and with Mengestu for writing this non-historical, non-realistic historical novel. Mengestu crafted a main character that had serious internalized racism, and was as anti-Black as a drunk Trump supporter at a tiki-torch rally. How can any reader explain a man who owns a store for the better part of a decade and a half in Black Washington, interacting with Black women of all classes and stripes — some presumably who may have struck up a conversation with him, some presumably with a precocious preteen daughter — and it’s this first White women in the neighborhood that raises your spirits?

Mengestu had Sepha do awkward Data-from-Star-Trek: TNG-type things. Like standing in the middle of the sidewalk a block from his place while watching Judith go into her house. Or over-explaining the shabbiness of his apartment to Judith, who invited herself over to his place. Or weird kisses between Sepha and Judith, not unlike ones involving two tweeners unsure of themselves. The awkwardness ultimately stems from Sepha’s elitism, self-loathing, and internalized racism. Judith is too good for me, was what Sepha thought, just like he thought he was too good for too poor and too Black Logan Circle. That’s why this thirtysomething man was acting like a weird homeless stalker, fully befitting a macabre and existential Dostoyevsky work.

But then came the backlash from the Mengestu-reverse-one-drop-rule approach to pre-gentrification gentrification. Somehow, the Black Washingtonians in Logan Circle became so hostile to the presence of one White woman with a kid that they threw a brick through her window and later set fire to her house. In what scenario in any major city in the US have Black folks ever deliberately attempted to forcibly drive out White folks who happened to move into a predominately Black neighborhood? There isn’t one.

My students, for the most part, though, loved the book. They thought it was “so cool” to get a glimpse of the “real” immigrant experience from an atypical perspective. They really liked the interplay between Sepha, Judith, and Naomi. They mostly wrote papers relating the book to the actual relations between Black Washingtonians in Shaw with the Ethiopia community there. They used Mengestu’s book as evidence that Blacks in Shaw drove Ethiopians out of Shaw and across the border into Silver Spring, Maryland, all because Black Shaw residents blocked renaming the U Street strip “Little Ethiopia” in 2005. All these conclusions, despite two full hours of discussion over two weeks about the books and its historical and local inconsistencies and stereotypes.

I haven’t been this beside myself about having inadvertently reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes since the first time I taught World History under Peter Stearns in 1994. But at least I was a 24-year-old grad student then. Now, I’m thinking that maybe 2.5 hours per week with my mostly affluent and White students is not enough time to counteract the idea that an excursion to Georgetown, Nats Park, or Chinatown is peak DC exploration. I also think that me as the little-old-nobody professor cannot overcome a MacArthur “genius” award-winner author whose book libraries possess in volume and school districts like DCPS and Montgomery County (and apparently) all over the country regularly use.

But if Mengestu is a genius, he is such because he has captured the White gaze. A story about Ethiopian migration to the US and the impact of such on that generation between the late-1970s and the turn of the 21st century. It is tailor-made to pull on the heartstrings of White Baby Boomers and loaded with a sense of exoticism. Mengestu’s DC looks more like where he grew up in real life (Peoria, Illinois and in the Chicagoland area — pretty White-bred communities, really) than any part of the DMV I have experienced since 1992. And no, being a Georgetown University student and earning a bachelor’s degree in the process is nowhere near enough time in DC to realistically depict even a sliver of DC, fiction or nonfiction.

I have learned my lesson. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears will not be a part of any course I teach moving forward. I will continue to pick books as I always have before this one. I will rely on my own counsel, and unlike most of my colleagues, will actually continue to read them before I put them in my syllabi. As for this DC course, I am replacing Mengestu’s book of anti-Blackness and elitism with Camille Acker’s Training School for Negro Girls. If I am going to continue to use historical fiction, it should center Black girls and Black women living in DC/the DMV, and not Mengestu’s kinder, gentler version of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Sepha.