Tag Archives: creativity

A Crooked and Curving Path

January 22, 2014 D.A. Adams 2 Comments

As I begin my last semester as an educator, I’ve been reflecting on how and why I got into this profession. I’ve written before about my writing career, the stops and starts along the way, and these two careers are intertwined like a tree and vine. In 1989, I suffered a devastating injury, one that derailed all of my previous dreams and aspirations. Through the recovery and grieving process from that incident, I discovered a passion and aptitude for writing, so when I began college, I did so with the intention of becoming a novelist. In 1995, the year I graduated from Memphis with my bachelor’s, I also published my first short story. About six months after that publication, an agent contacted me. He had read my piece, thought I had tremendous potential (his words on the phone), and wanted to know if I had a novel. I shipped off the first three chapters of my rough draft, believing my big break had arrived.

He hated the book, and rightfully so. Looking back, I now understand that it was dreadful. At the time, even though his harsh rejection stung, I didn’t let it derail me. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and studied my craft with more intensity and fervor than before. Within the next year, I published another short story and two poems (though I in no way consider myself a poet), and during that period from 1995 to 1997, my skills as a writer burgeoned more than any other period of my life. However, from those four publications, I earned exactly zero dollars, and I knew I had to find some way to earn a living. With that in mind, I chose to return to graduate school for an MFA in creative writing, believing that even if I couldn’t get my writing career off the ground, I would always have the terminal degree to fall back on.

My only real regret in life is going to graduate school. Without a doubt, that was the worst decision of my life. Perhaps my experience could have been different in another environment, but I entered it on a huge creative upswing, having multiple publications and incredible optimism. Within two months, all of the positive momentum was crushed from the pettiness of workshops and stifling negativity from my peers and faculty. To this day, I refuse to endure another moment of a writers’ group because of those experiences. Within six months of entering graduate school, my productivity went from at least one solid story a month to virtually nothing, and by the time I finished my first year, I had given up on writing completely. Because of the negative experience and also due to personal circumstances, I switched from the MFA program to just the MA degree to finish faster and get away from that environment.

That was when I made the decision to teach. Though my creative desires had been squelched, my love for language had not, and I figured that if I weren’t talented enough to create my own books, I could at least share my knowledge and passion with others. In the English Department at the University of Memphis, we had an excellent instructor training program, and during my year in that program, I developed the foundation that has served me throughout my teaching career. Part of what frustrates me about the current rush to replace traditional teaching practices with technology is that I know firsthand how many years of study, practice, refinement, and field trial has been poured into traditional education models, yet administrators are convinced that the new way, developed mostly by educational companies with an eye on profits, is superior before it has even been implemented. I find this rush to overly rely on technology in the classroom short-sighted and potentially dangerous, but that’s another topic for another day.

As I made the transition mentally from writer to instructor, fortunately, teaching came quite naturally to me, and for the first few years, I woke up each morning excited to go to work. I loved pushing my students to improve, to pay more attention to their thoughts, to develop an eye for details. I loved lecturing, sharing my ideas, and demonstrating techniques. I gave each class everything I had every meeting, and I was highly effective as an educator. I say this not to brag on myself as much as a warning to others. People like me who are effective and passionate about our profession are being burned out, used up, and sometimes pushed out in this corporate takeover of the system. That fact scares me for our future.

As I sit here, reflecting on my time in the classroom and pondering what my future may hold, I’m both grateful for the opportunity to have impacted my students’ lives but also resentful of the changes that have stripped the passion for this profession from me. It will take some time to clear this bad taste from my mouth, but I am excited to press forward into whatever the future holds. While I would not change my decision to teach because of all the positive experiences, I recognize that the time has come for me to leave behind this profession before I become a bitter shell. That’s all for now.

Inspirational

An Obstacle is Merely an Opportunity

January 16, 2014 D.A. Adams 7 Comments

Those are words I try to live by, though some days are bigger challenges than others. There is no end to the list of obstacles writers in America face today. From the glutted market to the dumbed-down populace to the overpowering sway of the corporate media behemoths, being a fiction writer, especially an independent, often feels akin to the fate of Sisyphus. I will keep rolling my boulder, however, because that’s what I was put here to do. Whether I can ever get it over the hump or am condemned to watch it roll back to the bottom every evening, I will keep pushing.

Unlike Sisyphus, I can learn and adapt my tactics. This year, for example, I intend to broaden my reach in European markets. If American audiences are too enthralled with dinosaur porn to read good fiction, maybe I can find a foothold there. I intend to look into other markets, as well, like Australia, but Europe will be first because I already have a slight presence there. One way or the other, I will expand my readership this year.

I read a good article the other day about how people should focus more on their processes than on their goals. I’ve always applied this concept to writing, and I’m going to attempt to apply it to promotion as well. I’m going to examine and improve upon the ways in which I promote my works and aim for increasing the effectiveness of my efforts, instead of just setting a goal and focusing on that. The article also talked about focusing on small, incremental changes to processes instead of large, sweeping overhauls, so I’m going to look closely at what I do and how I do it and then attempt to improve upon what I’m already doing. In that way, I will get this stone over the mountain and treat these obstacles as opportunities.

General Posts

Want to teach your students about structural racism? Prepare for a formal reprimand.

December 26, 2013 D.A. Adams 3 Comments

This article is from Slate:

Shannon Gibney is a professor of English and African diaspora studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). When that’s your job, there are a lot of opportunities to talk about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. There are also a lot of opportunities to anger students who would rather not learn about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. I presume MCTC knows that; they have an African diaspora studies program. Back in January 2009, white students made charges of discrimination after Gibney suggested to them that fashioning a noose in the newsroom of the campus newspaper—as an editor had done the previous fall—might alienate students of color. More recently, when Gibney led a discussion on structural racism in her mass communication class, three white students filed a discrimination complaint because it made them feel uncomfortable. This time, MCTC reprimanded Gibney under their anti-discrimination policy.

Elevating discomfort to discrimination mocks the intent of the policy, but that’s not the whole of it. By sanctioning Gibney for making students uncomfortable, MCTC is pushing a disturbing higher-education trend. When colleges and universities become a market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know. When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all poorer for it.

For the white students who escalated their discomfort to the administration at MCTC, what seemed to upset them most is the concept of structural racism. As a teacher, I find that all students struggle with the idea of structure. The American myth of rugged individualism is alive and well. We love to believe that nothing determines our life’s chances but our capacity to dream and work hard, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. For most students, my class is the first time they have ever talked seriously about capitalism or had a black woman as an authority figure. And when the structure in question is racism and someone who looks like me is leading the discussion, white students struggle particularly hard. How can something be racist if they do not intend it to be racist? And why should they listen to me? Sociologists like Joe Faegin and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have dismantled our post-racial delusions, showing how racism happens without racists.

Take white flight, for example. Few white homebuyers request only to be shown houses in white neighborhoods. But real estate agents consider this screening part of their jobs. And when neighborhoods get too diverse, white families start selling, sparking a downward spiral of declining home values and tax bases that affects resources such as schools. If you’re the brown and black kids in one of those schools, it doesn’t matter if anyone intended to be racist. For those kids and their life chances, structural racism is real regardless of intent. Gibney’s class discussions sound solidly grounded in mainstream research. A white student may feel discomfort when it’s pointed out to him how he has benefited from structural racism, but to compare that discomfort to discrimination is a false equivalency. Hurt feelings hurt, but it is not oppression.

But hurt feelings can be bad for business. And a lot of powerful people think colleges should act more like businesses. When they do, students act more like customers. And our likely customers might not be amicable to discussions about structural racism. If the customer is always right, then the majority share of customers is more right than the minority. While blacks and Hispanics have increased their college participation—and they are projected to continue to do so—61 percent of all college students are still white. A survey from researchers at Tufts and Harvard found that “whites believe that they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.” A sizable number of male voters seem to believe that men are still more naturally suited to be president of the United States. Young people think racist and sexist slurs are wrong, but “they don’t take much personal offense.”

If I want to piss off the majority of higher education’s customers, then defying the natural superiority of men by being a female authority figure, countering white oppression beliefs by appealing to structural racism, and making young people feel the emotions of being offended would seem like a good way to go. If, like Gibney, I were a professor hired to teach diaspora studies, doing so would be my job.

Teaching what people would rather not learn is especially tough if you are a woman or a minority professor. Research shows that our customers rate Asian-American, Hispanic, black, and women professors lower than white male professors across all subjects. Most disturbingly, student evaluations of women of color are harshest when customers are told that the results will be “communicated to a third party for the purposes of evaluation.” Our customers are not only disinclined to like tough subjects; they’re also inclined to take their discomfort out on minority professors, who are the least likely to have the protection of tenure or support from university administration.

Learning is—should often be—uncomfortable for individuals. When universities have a mission to serve the public good, they balance the needs of individuals with benefits to society and the power of the majority against the humanity of the minority. Calls to “unbundle” the university never talk about what happens to that mission when we only learn what makes us comfortable—what it means for minority students and professors or the counternarratives they produce. The promise of market models of higher education like massive open online courses is that student-customers can build their own degree from a buffet of choices. But the buffet is heavy on science and math classes, and light on courses like humanities and social science where structural racism, sexism, and classism are taught. It is easy to imagine that in a college buffet, students who make nooses as a team-building exercise won’t take courses that might make them uncomfortable about doing so. Students wanting that choice make sense. Universities giving them the choice to make a few dollars does not make sense. Visionaries who sell us on these buffets allude to a future meritocratic economy. The implication is that the future does not need gatekeepers, leaders, or citizens who understand why making a noose in the student newsroom might be bad for morale.

Of course, nooses in the newsroom are only bad for the morale of some members of the team—the members least likely to make it to the newsroom because structural racism and sexism makes it harder for them to get there. And should they swim upstream to make it to the hallowed halls of higher education, the newsroom, or the technocratic future, we need not worry about their comfort, because profit margins chase market share. In the higher education market, we’re being sold “the customer is king.” That means a college’s highest purpose is co-creating a future that looks a lot like our past: educated but still unequal. That makes me very uncomfortable.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a Slate writer and Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Emory University. Follow her on Twitter.

Read the original article here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/counter_narrative/2013/12/minneapolis_professor_shannon_gibney_reprimanded_for_talking_about_racism.html