{"id":2280,"date":"2016-12-04T10:10:59","date_gmt":"2016-12-04T18:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2280"},"modified":"2017-11-08T21:41:39","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:41:39","slug":"teaching-and-bad-affect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2016\/12\/04\/teaching-and-bad-affect\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching and bad affect"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m teaching an Anthropology of Europe class and I decided we\u2019d end by talking about current events. So the week before this, we talked about the Greek economic crisis and Syriza. This week, we talked about Brexit. On Thursday, we talked about Islam and political violence in Europe (France in 2015 \u2014 Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan \u2014 and then, by way of contrast, Germany in 1993 \u2014 the Solingen burning of a Turkish family\u2019s home).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So we talked about crisis, basically. But this was only a crisis within a crisis, because crisis was already omnipresent in our classroom environment. The whole class has been a slow-moving affective crisis, for me. (This is saying something redundant, admittedly, since most crises feel like slow motion at the time, the slow motion of shock at least, or the slow motion of ambiguity, even if they get reframed in hindsight as events; and most crises are affective, except for the ones that you don\u2019t yet\u00a0know how to sense…)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been the sort of class where, a lot of the time, after you leave the room, as the teacher, you feel obscurely broken down and sad, and then the feelings linger into the evening, and then they emerge again with the next class, or at most they get vaguely attenuated without dissipating. I actually do think my students have learned a number of important things about Europe (they had barely heard of Franco, or even of socialism), and their papers and homework show a lot of thinking and knowledge, but I don’t think\u00a0they<\/i> think they\u2019re learning something. Instead, they largely feel disaffected about\u00a0the whole endeavor. So this\u00a0\u2014 how shall I put it? \u2014 this collective mood of detachment frowns down on the classroom as soon as I open my mouth.\u00a0It just\u00a0hasn’t gone away in\u00a0months.<\/p>\n

Three major contexts played a role in the production of this dire teaching\u00a0atmosphere.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The room<\/span>: at first they put the class in a huge lecture hall (see picture above), which pushed the first month of class into a quasi-lecture mode, discouraging conversation and fostering standardized disaffection. By the time we got a smaller room, all the bad group dynamics had already crystallized.<\/li>\n
  2. My own ignorance of this student population<\/span>: what they can read, what they can write, what they expect, how to give them instructions, how to get them involved in anything. It took weeks of\u00a0trying various exercises and formats to\u00a0find something that got the non-talkative students to be remotely engaged.<\/li>\n
  3. The reality of disaffection<\/span>: starting early on, it was clear that some students were going to be, well, much more engaged<\/i> than others. From where I sit, the students fall into three general groups: the talkative, the shy, and the permanently disaffected. The talkative students are\u00a0great\u00a0and they do get engaged with the material, but they are a minority; I feel guilty for not having found ways to get the shy students more involved; and I feel outright frustrated by the students who more deliberately tune out.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If I had been a more experienced teacher, I might have overcome much of the shyness and disaffection, I think, in those first weeks where things still felt fluid. But as things stand, I feel that I\u2019ve come away learning more from my class than the students did. Partly I learned a lot about teaching techniques: as in music, you have to make every possible mistake, it seems, at some point along the way. Partly I just learned more about the course content, about Europe and about my own reading assignments. When you make a new syllabus, you don\u2019t really know how well everything will hang together until you put it in front of the class, and I\u2019ve learned a lot of little empirical connections, like how precarious African migrants in Italy actually have some connection to the sociology of Brexit. Writing a hyperspecialized PhD is really such poor preparation for teaching about an entire continent. (Though I\u00a0also talked about how\u00a0Europe is a fake\u00a0category error\u00a0of a continent.)<\/p>\n

    Perversely, it’s only now that I\u2019m almost done teaching the class that I finally feel ready to start teaching it. Part of me just thinks: OK, I\u2019m learning, I\u2019m learning, next year will be much better. Part of me thinks: it\u2019s partly random, even experienced teachers have classes that never come together. A senior colleague came to observe my class in October; I remember vividly how unhappy he<\/em> was last semester when he faced\u00a0a similarly disconnected mood in one of his own classes. Part of me thinks: people are how they are, it\u2019s not all about me or our group dynamics. One of my own students even told me, privately, not to expect much from the clique of the\u00a0disaffected: I gather their stance may not be entirely specific to me. Part of me thinks: I really wasn’t trained to teach students like these; many of them really dislike reading, even what I think are short and accessible readings. (I’m sure\u00a0I just have false consciousness about what “accessible” readings are for them.)<\/p>\n

    But I also really need these rationalizations, and I recognize that they are <\/i>rationalizations, because it\u2019s just so painful to have a class not go well. Admittedly, it doesn\u2019t say in my job description that producing good moods is required. But somehow, it\u2019s still there somewhere in the unwritten rules. Consequently, my sense of disappointment is also a sense of transgression.<\/p>\n

    My grad school teacher Lauren Berlant says that bad teaching is inevitable (“like bad parenting”). My collaborator\u00a0Charles Souli\u00e9 from France told me once, after I visited his sociology classroom, that \u201cuncertainty is a constant of the trade.\u201d But the general doesn\u2019t really redeem the particular (never has, never will). And\u00a0I expect\u00a0that I don\u2019t need theoretical redemption here so much as a more developed reparative practice. Never\u00a0making teaching mistakes would be good, but knowing how to fix mistakes would be better. Like\u00a0in software development: most of the work consists of fixing your own mistakes, debugging weird behavior (whether by machines or organisms), getting things back on track.<\/p>\n

    Or again as in music: you can make all kinds of technical mistakes as long as you don\u2019t let the audience catch on. I mean, I don\u2019t cry in the classroom; I have a performative face, of course. But I also don\u2019t like leaving the room in so many shapes of sadness. So I suppose I also need better affective buffers against the reality of weird moods\u00a0\u2014 which also seem to be a \u201cconstant of the trade.\u201d To teach is to be permeated by your students’ moods. But that vulnerability isn’t always an asset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I\u2019m teaching an Anthropology of Europe class and I decided we\u2019d end by talking about current events. So the week before this, we talked about the Greek economic crisis and Syriza. This week, we talked about Brexit. On Thursday, we talked about Islam and political violence in Europe (France in 2015 \u2014 Charlie Hebdo and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[494],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2280"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2513,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2280\/revisions\/2513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}