A more interesting comment came from another student in the following class meeting. He told me he had come home from class and his friends were watching the "Gangnam Style" video and attempting the dance and then he felt the need to extend our class discussion into his dorm room. Obviously I loved this. But he followed his anecdote with a relatively deflated, "I don't think I'll ever be able to just listen to and enjoy that song again." This seemed reminiscent to Hook's remembrance of a student saying "We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can't enjoy life anymore" (42). Hooks "respect[s] the pain" and acknowledges "that new ways of knowing may create estrangement where there was none" (43). Obviously I am all for opening our students' eyes to new perspectives and potentially harmful obliviousness (is that a word?). But part of me also feels for the student who just wants to do a goofy dance to a song he can't understand.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
"Don't you think we're reading too much into this?"
On Friday I did an activity in both of my classes were we attempted to analyze the song "Gangnam Style" by a Korean pop artist. The lyrics are mainly in Korean, so we spent the first half of the class looking specifically at the imagery and surface connotations of the music video, and then re-examined our original interpretations after watching the video again with English subtitles. I even had an article to go along with it, but my students generally got the underlying messages of class commentary without it. (For anyone interested, here is the link.) Both classes had really good conversations and made really good observations about the video's message. But I also got the comment, "I think that maybe it's just a song and we're reading too much into it." I remember hearing this sentiment from classmates as an undergraduate and even in high school English courses. Someone inevitably felt that sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar."
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Kacy, I really enjoyed reading this post. That's an awesome activity idea, and I'd be interested in hearing your lesson plan, because I think I may want to steal it. I know what you mean, too, about students mildly complaining that now they can't enjoy a song, a movie, or a TV show after having to analyze it in class. I always get a little defensive when they say that, though. Like, so now you have to think a little bit? Isn't that just being a productive member of society? But I have a feeling that even though that kid maybe was dismayed at the moment, he'll get over it and then be smarter for it, thanks to you. :)
ReplyDeleteOn the flip side (and I've talked to you about this before), I brought in a seemingly hardly article into my class by the writer Roxane Gay. In it she talks about the problem with the lack of diversity on "The Bachelor." I thought it'd be a fun article to summarize since it was about a popular television show they had heard of. Instead, I was met with all sorts of resistance and hostility. Instead of trying to focus on the assignment and the point of the article, many of them wanted to argue how Gay was reading too much into the show, and how "people see problems that aren't there." The situation made me realize how much students have blinders on to the world, partly because they haven't experienced much, and partly because a lot of them are spouting viewpoints from their upbringing.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I did enjoy that hooks quote you mention. It reminded me that part of our jobs as teachers is to get students thinking about the world (and not just texts) critically. In doing that, however, students will begin to see just how much sometimes the world is unfair and even cruel. Like hooks, I also "respect the pain" that stems from this new critical viewpoint, because that's really, I feel, when change can occur.
None of us wants to imagine that we could be acting from a place of bias - either that we could possibly be treating people differently or that we are treated differently. I applaud you that have used material to confront this issue. Hooks writes, Most progressive professors are more comfortable striving to challenge class biases through the material studied than they are with interrogating how class biases shape conduct in the classroom and transforming their pedagogical process? Where are with this, I wonder?
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