The Post-Cool-Era-Classroom by Mark Koyama

This week’s post is by guest writer Mark Koyama. Mark is a writer, musician and graduate of the UMass MFA program. Mark taught College Writing and has served as a mentor to first-year teachers.

I’ll wager that if you look out over your fresh batch of 112 students you can count at least half-a-dozen Red Sox Caps. Am I right? Welcome to Red Sox Nation. As it turns out, a Red Sox Cap ain’t just a Red Sox Cap—it’s also a form of protective headgear. Before long, several young men will pull their caps down over their foreheads, slouch down, and in this defensive stance, be thoroughly protected from the chance of learning anything.

I’m making a Terrible Generalization. I’ll do the requisite back-pedaling in due time, but before doing that, let me indulge in another T.G: you know those students who refuse to make eye contact? They aren’t shy. They’re texting.

I know, I know. This is turning into one of those “kids these days” rants. The thing to remember is that they’re not dumb, and they’re not trying to be bad and they may not be really texting. That’s so high school. It’s not that they don’t want to learn. Most of the students are genuinely excited about being in college. What is it then? What makes it seem like they just don’t care? It’s really no great mystery. It’s actually quite simple.

They’re trying to be cool.

The paraphernalia of cool may shift from generation to generation, but the fundamentals remain the same. Since time immemorial, being cool has been a posturing game. To be really cool, one has to know when to fit in, and when to be aloof (and, of course, one must never use the word “one” as a pronoun.) The “fitting in” part involves wearing the obligatory emblem of regional pride – the Red Sox Cap. The “being aloof” part involves pulling the cap down and feigning disinterest in the anything proceeding from the mouth of anyone older then twenty-five years of age (who uses the word “one” as a pronoun.)

As a teacher in the a first-year writing course the “fitting-in” part of the equation is not your concern. It’s the “being aloof” part that you need to worry about. It can be a killer. It feels, at times, like there is direct correlation between the earnest fervor with which one tries express an idea, and how much the students greet that same idea with blithe disregard. Earnestness, you see, is anathema to cool. To be earnest, you must be willing to commit to the truth of an idea. But commitment, too, is anathema to cool. These things – earnestness, truth, commitment – they are probably listed in the thesaurus as antonyms for “aloof.”

But again – the aloof thing is not about the students being bad. No. Remember, the students are in a critical moment of transition in their lives. They are figuring out who they are and what is important to them. They are picking and choosing. It makes sense that they will do this from as safe a vantage as possible – from under the Red Sox Cap.

What’s your job? Do you order them to take off the Red Sox Cap? Do you coerce them to take it off with some grading policy stipulation? Or do you just let them keep it on?

I think it’s important that you try, early in the semester, to establish a culture in your classroom. The best learning, I think, takes place in a culture of discussion. Discussion is the dynamic that slowly, and imperceptibly erodes the aloof culture of cool. Discussion has the power to transform something you think is important, into something we find to be worth thinking about. Discussion fosters an environment in which people discover that it’s OK to let their guard down and get excited about an idea. They may not even know its happening—they may feel uneasy, but that’s alright because real learning happens when students are out of their comfort zones. Learning happens when the students get so worked up about the truth of an idea, that they lose their cool. That’s why the culture of the classroom – your College Writing classroom – should be the culture of the post-cool era.

I think the College Writing 112 curriculum is actually pretty amazing. If you think about it, the Unit 1 essay is the perfect opportunity to begin fostering a culture of discussion. You are asking them to write about themselves – which is risky for them. You are asking them to write about what they believe and why. But they may not know what they believe until they start writing about it. Writing, in this sense, is not about recording who one is, as much as discovering who one is. This surprising reality is a great doorway into discussion. If this strange dynamic elicits even the barest glimpse of honesty from the mouth of one of your students, make sure everyone in the class recognizes what just happened! This will jump start the slow process of engendering the post-cool-era-classroom.

Don’t be disappointed if, at the end of the semester, you look out and see that only a handful of caps have been taken off. You are teaching the entire class – but you may really influence only a handful. Don’t underestimate the power and the significance of that influence – those students may remember you for the rest of their lives, because you showed them something important. It’s a beautiful thing.

3 Replies to “The Post-Cool-Era-Classroom by Mark Koyama”

  1. Mark – what a great post! And Peggy: I love the blog so far! As an experienced blogger (ahem), I can report that it definitely takes a while to find an audience for these things; but I think there’s real hunger out there among teachers (and not just in First Year Writing) to talk about classroom struggles and successes. I hope you all will keep this up!

    OK, Mark, here’s my comment: you’re so right about the difficulties that the contemporary youth culture presents to an engaged classroom, and I love your optimism that teachers can learn to look beyond the classroom pose of our students and build a space for honest, enlightening, democratic discussion.

    But I sometimes wonder if our focus on authenticity might be part of the problem. I’ve been reading lately about the efficacy of structured debate and disagreement in learning – Richard Light argues in Making the Most of College that such artificial activities can have a positive impact on student engagement. In his study, students remembered very positively the kinds of classes where the instructor would literally divide up the students and ask half of them to prepare to defend one position in a difficult controversy and the other half to defend the opposed position. It turns out that students find such assignments oddly liberating – as in the theater, such activity allows them to hide behind a “role,” and speak/write/think/act AS IF they felt a certain way. Light found that such assignments could be powerful learning environments.

    I’ve been wondering if this might be done in College Writing. Imagine that you had your students read Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place”; but instead of asking them “what did you think?” about the piece, you assigned them to participate in a structured discussion or debate in which they had assigned positions and had to collaborate with others to articulate and defend those positions both orally and in writing. Maybe writing and speaking AS IF they had a particular position on such an issue could help them actually begin to inhabit such positions (whether their assigned positions or the positions of their peers on the other side of the room).

    I mention this because I worry that, in terms of fostering good discussions, we put too much pressure on our students to have deeply felt, authentic opinions and feelings about the topics we’re reading or talking about. After all, they’re just 18 years old – maybe it’s too much to expect them to have deeply felt opinions about every particular topic we present them. Maybe we’d do better to ask them, at least as a start, just to PRETEND that they held such opinions and feelings. Then, AFTER they’ve talked and written in that vein for several class meetings, maybe they would actually begin to think or feel a particular way.

    In any case, Mark, thank you for getting us all thinking about this important and pervasive problem in teaching!

    1. In Defense of the Red Sox caps…

      Thanks to Mark and David for their comments on student engagement, discussion, and defensive dressing! I, too, was put off a bit by the downward stare and the Red Sox caps in my classes when I first came to UMass. I interpreted the cap-over-the-eyes look as a sign that my students were not engaged with the class discussion and sometimes as a sign that they just weren’t listening to a thing I was saying. I learned about half-way through my first semester that some of my students — who I assumed were thinking about anything except what was going on in class– were actually quite with it! One day, I asked a question and one of my Red Sox cappers, someone who was normally quiet, looked up and answered, pulling in pieces of the day’s discussion, the reading from the class before, and even referenced something I had said. I have to admit I was a little stunned. What I had taken for disengagement had been perhaps shyness or even– quiet thinking.

      I do find that in general the students in my classes here at UMass, both in Basic Writing and College Writing, tend to be quiet and respectful. Sometimes they don’t strain to participate the way students did at other institutions I have taught at. But that first semester’s surprise response (and there were others) made me realize that sometimes there’s more going on under the cap than I first assumed.

  2. Hey David:

    Thanks for your response. I like the idea of the structured debate ala Richard Light quite a bit. I can imagine that if one had a particularly reticent group of students, such a strategy might be just the thing to lubricate the cogs a little and get some voices talking.

    So much of the culture of a classroom is built upon expectation. The problem I often had was that I’d given so much thought to how best to articulate an idea that I felt compelled to lecture a bit — which gave the students the expectation that they could sit back and let me to do all the work. I felt like a draft horse pulling a dozen students behind me. Group work was the obvious antidote to that — but then there were the inevitable groups that just sat there and didn’t bother participating.

    The idea of assigning groups of students a specific perspective and having them prepare something for class may be one way to get other voices involved. Of course this strategy may fall prey to the same lackadaisical predilections that other group work suffers from. (Maybe one could use SPARK to mitigate this problem — have them post some ideas on SPARK that one can print and have on hand to use to jump start things if they get slow).

    This mock debate idea might work particularly well in Unit 2 where some of the purpose of discussion is to get the main themes into clear view and responsibly summarize the author’s perspective.

    Or, another way to incorporate the “Light” debate method might be to introduce Unit 3 with it. If you have the class working around a theme for Unit 3 — groups of students could gather sources from the media that present specific angles on that theme.

    The operative ida here is piggy-backing on someone else’s conviction. Its like playing scales or arpeggios when you are learning an instrument — first the student gets the feel for it, then they go off on your own.

    best,

    Mark

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