So I’ve been sending out weekly emails with the homework for the week written out point-by-point for my students. They like it better than a handout in class, because they can’t lose it, they’re forced to confront it when they check their email, it’s a nice reminder when they haven’t done it yet — there were a lot of reasons they cited that the materiality of the email serves them better than the materiality of the in-class handout, so that’s how we ended up here.
I, too, enjoy the email. It allows me to move back and forth between different tonal registers, something I find myself doing often in my teaching, in my speaking, often in the space of a few seconds. I love experimenting with different rhetorical strategies and gauging student/peer/professor responses, as well as responses from strangers on the street and what-have-you. It’s something I learned to do quickly as an Asian-American, I think, residing outside of the Black – White binary, but not possessing the stereotypical accent that people would like to attribute to my body.
Growing up, I was heavily influenced by hip-hop, by black kids, and by rock, by white kids. These were the two sort of polarized points that were available to me, so I often navigated the line between these musics, these people, my white friends, my black friends, and my Asian friends often participated in the same negotiation of racialized music, of racialized peer groups — and each of these groups came with their own particular vernaculars, which differed from the Asian-American vernaculars which we all were familiar with, and which themselves varied greatly from each other.
When I make handouts for my students, I never really put the same sort of variance into the document — it becomes more official, perhaps, more formal — which is definitely only a perception on my part, as the email, it seems, is longer lasting, perhaps more official, and definitely more incriminating were anyone to try to uncover my terrible pedagogical practices and wish to gather evidence against me.
(Joke. I hope.)
In essence, the printed document is a white-washed version of myself, and I’ve learned to decolorize my documents in this way because, I think, growing up in a school system based on paper handouts, I’ve learned the “proper” rhetoric with which to address students through paper.
Indeed, last year I received a bit of interrogation from CEAT as to why I adopted a tone they viewed as too “casual” in the intro to the important recorded document that is the syllabus.
(It was a failed attempt to navigate these lines … As well as a failed pedagogical experiment that valued the student’s current perception over the student’s challenging of her own perception … But that’s a narrative for another time.)
What I’ve been learning to do is to navigate within the lines of proper syllabus rhetorical discourse without sacrificing the voice/focus/energy that I believe is imperative to a sound pedagogy. The teacher is an embodied individual, and the teacher’s unique worldview and existence should be available, at least unconsciously, to the students, so that they might better develop the relationship with the teacher that allows them to confront their own perceptions of the world in the rigorous manner that our composition courses ask them to.
I’m really jumping all over here.
Perhaps that’s the point, though.
I love disrupting expected discourse. I love the dissonance that comes with people confronting their own racialized ideas of the way in which they believe people speak, the vocabularies, the tones, etc. And I am privileged enough that I have the ability to speak in a variety of settings without worrying what someone might think of me. I am privileged enough to be able to, for the most part, use a form of speech and writing that the academy accepts. But I am also oppressed in that developing this ability has been a survival tactic for me, not something that I was born into, and that I believe that in order for me to be an autonomous, actualized person, I have to participate in the adoption of all the various codes that I’ve invested in — that is to say, I have no default mode of speech — it is always a game, always a blending in, always a disruption, but always, in the end, feeling inauthentic, lacking.
Without any further ado, I’d like to show you what I drafted, originally, for the email.
5. After this, we will focus mostly on revision. If you have any ideas for revision prompts, send them to me along with your answer to #2. The crazier, the better!
6. Also, if you want to, please send me your poems that you wrote in class. I want to show some people, because I was blown away by how crazy they were. Also, I was thinking we could make up a fake name and send these things out under one alias. They’re really good and I really love how they’re this melting pot of our collective genius. But we can talk about that and potential problems and ideas on Monday.
7. You guys rock.
Toodles~
Kazumi
I’d never ended an email with “Toodles” before. I thought it was funny. It made me laugh. Toodles. Ha. Toodles. And in having this thought, I thought it’d be funny to end the email instead with:
PS Always wanted to sign off an email with toodles
And I like that there’s no punctuation, because there’s something pleasurable in not having punctuation, in doing away with formality, and not even using the “I” — It’s not “I always wanted” — it’s brief, and to the point: “PS Always wanted.”
And this, I think, points out what I’ve been saying — earlier in the email I wrote:
2. I am interested in this notion of “going too far” that came up in class, but never was addressed —
“Interested in this notion” is totally an adopted phrase. In no way do I feel personally comfortable using it. But I rock it because it makes me laugh. Everything I say makes me laugh because it never feels attached to me. I’m like a word chameleon, rocking that crazy color-blending shit.
😎 <— Cool sunglasses face.
He actually doesn’t care. Not one bit. I imagine his arms are crossed, he’s leaning back in a chair, and he doesn’t even want to look at you, because, you know, what, he actually doesn’t give a shit.
I like cussing, sometimes. I wonder how people react to words like “shit.” It’s not a terrible word, not in the way that “fuck” or “bitch” or other words more loaded and dripping with patriarchy, so I don’t really feel bad in using it.
This is bordering on incoherence, now. Which is more about my sleepy body and less about my rhetorical strategy.
So I’m going to end with this. The “You guys rock” is heartfelt and authentic. I did not plan it. It simply happened. I love my class this semester. They are beautiful people, even if some of them are sort of misogynistic and homophobic. And I think that’s what it takes to be able to change anything at all. Is to be able to recognize good people as good people, even when they sort of bask in their privilege, and can’t seem to shift their perspective. This has been hard for me to realize. It’s something I’m still working on. When people don’t see how they’re unintentionally perpetuating racist patriarchal discourse, it’s really not because they’re bad people, but because they’re brainwashed by the system and too insecure to give up the privilege. Honestly. I believe this, too. Slowly, slowly.
My student told me that our poetry journey has helped her remember what freedom tasted like. She did this in email. In email we can say things that we could otherwise be embarrassed to say. In writing we can say these things. This is why I enjoy writing these emails to my students. This is why we write poetry. Because we can make ourselves vulnerable for other people, because we can ask others to come inside of us, in a way that is okay, in a way we can control, and we can be beautiful for each other, and take each other on journeys, and give each other the freedom we deserve.
