Problematic

I had never heard this word before I started working on my PhD. Then it became my favorite word. I overused it all the time, applied it to every situation I could. It sounded smart to me. It was my go-to word for years. Then I saw someone write that problematic was just white scholars' way of continuing to like what they wanted even if it was racist or misogynist or sexist or otherwise bad. And I felt that.

Since I've been working on this edited collection that deals with why we reboot, remake, revisit, and reimagine horror films, and how the answer is tied to both trauma and nostalgia studies, I've been thinking a lot about what we get out of these revisitings. Why do we return again and again to things? In turn I've also been thinking of all the things I can no longer revisit or do not revisit because I know they have deep issues and I don't want to taint my original memory of a thing. Growing up I loved Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, the Indiana Jones films, the Lethal Weapon movies. These movies though are not "problematic" they're rapey, racist, present white colonial narratives, feature bigot anti-Semites. I cannot watch them anymore no matter how much I once liked and loved them. I struggle to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer in light of reports of sexist behavior. I won't watch anything with Johnny Depp in them. Firefly has been ruined by Adam Baldwin's bigoted rants. But me losing things I once liked is nothing compared to decades and decades of celebrating racist, sexist, bigoted, predominantly white narratives. It's not problematic it is wrong. And there is just no way to get around that.

Over the holidays there were movies released online and I saw a flurry of several different threads appear on Twitter. One bemoaned fact that straight to online, skipping the theatre, movies meant people didn't respect etiquette of not spoiling films. Assuming everyone had access and therefore was watching immediately. Another talked about how if a person liked a thing and you didn't there was no reason to shit on the thing they liked. Yet another took a couple of the films that came out and laid out step by step how awful they were, for racism, classism, digital blackface, rapey storylines, non-consent, sexism, misogyny, poor portrayals of women. Maybe once, before Twitter and other social media, I could have watched a thing and liked it or not, perhaps changing my mind as I thought about things more. But now, when I read what people write about how a movie erases their identity, hurts them, continues harmful practices, I can't ignore it or pretend like it doesn't matter, or that somehow my enjoyment of a thing is more important than the hurt a thing causes.

It's a situation teachers face all the time. Too often teachers and professors dismiss the hurt of others, their students, their parents, other teachers, and do so in such a way that weaponizes their intellect. The teacher is knowledgeable, those others are not. The teacher represents a higher intellectual authority and must be listened to. The hurt of certain novels, portrayals, and teaching is ignored, dismissed, in order to continue the status quo. One of my most shameful memories is when I was a younger teacher and a Black parent told me that they did not appreciate their child having to say and hear the n-word as my class read To Kill a Mockingbird out loud. At the time I listened to the parent but dismissed them, claiming it was required reading, a classic. It was years before I listened and faced the horrible harm I'd done to so many students in my class. The canon gets used a lot in teaching as a way to say "screw you" to people. To tell whole groups of students that their narrative, or their discomfort and trauma caused by other narratives, does not matter. Labelling something "problematic" is used in similar ways. It is used to state that you know something is wrong and you don't care. It's not that movies from the 80s did not know that rape or racist stereotypes were bad. It's that they didn't care. It's not that people didn't know that X actor was an abuser. It that people did not care.

For too many fans and scholars it feels like once they label something problematic they are done and no longer have to deal with the issues in the text. They did their job, they paid lip service, but there is no onus to not teach it. Or teach it in such a way as to call out the racism, sexism, bigotry, anti-Semitism. Or teach an alternate novel or work and only mention the other text AS a racist, sexist text. 

In k-12 I've come to believe that there is no reason to teach the canon. I think if we ask ourselves what we want these foundational years to do the answer is to teach students to read and analyze and critically think about what they read. To learn to explore places, people, religions and cultures they might not know otherwise, but also to teach texts that show them their own narratives, and accurate portrayals of our country and its history.

When you get to college I'm of a similar mind. I think in most cases there are few pedagogical reasons to teach an unexamined canon. I think in many surveys teaching narratives students haven't been exposed to, or novels that aren't the one book from that one author everyone knows, are more valuable. I think using courses to correct or balance hundreds of years of biased, white narratives is important. 

A common argument in the canon wars is no one is telling you that you can't still read X. And that's certainly true. I would ask though why are you? What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want your students to get out of it? How does it fit in the goals of the class? Of your students? I wish more professors thought about what their pedagogical reasons were were teaching certain texts and scholars, to consider the harm they may be doing to their students in teaching certain texts and scholars, and rethink their approaches.

On Twitter the other day someone asked how many classes people had taught in their careers. As I tried to do the math in my head, I realized that while I have taught lots of British Literature I surveys, and Shakespeare classes, and Composition I and II classes, I have never taught the same class. Not when I taught English 9-12 or AP Literature and Language, and not now. First, I've never understood how people teach the same thing every semester, every year, year after year, for decades, because my students are different each semester. I think differently about topics and scholars each semester. The world changes, new texts come out, new technologies. 

I think if folks are dead set on teaching On the Road (a book I once loved), For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Adventures of Huck Finn, I think it's important to be explicit about why you are. I think you need to explain why you chose this book to your students. You have to face all the issues in these books. And have honest conversations about those issues. I think you need to particularly use scholars and specific work to highlight responses to these works in the time since they were published. 

These conversations can be transformative, and are not limited to that class or even discipline. I am a medievalist and early modernist who works in folklore and popular culture. Yet the classes that most shaped who I am as a scholar were classes on the American West, Chican@ Films, and Southwest Folklore. These classes introduced me to the idea of resituating The Last of the Mohicans as a the first frontier novel. They taught me about films and scholars that centered Indigenous and Chican@ narratives and called out the issues with Anglo directors, writers, structures, telling these stories. They introduced me to interdisciplinary studies, the value of readng across periodizations, and changing perspectives. It was these professors who had the most impact on me and the work I do. They taught me to ask questions, to "problematize" what I'd been taught, and provided models for my own work.

I would love to teach a class on the American West. Starting with The Last of the Mohicans as the first frontier novel, how it and our concept of what the West was is a microcosm for so many of our societal ills. Our privileging of certain narratives, the erasure of cultures, how this erasure, chaacterizing them as less than human was only to enable expansion at any costs. How these brutal, violent events get romanticized and revised almost immediately. How these stories that children grew up on enable them to provide these same views to anyone they encounter, in their communities, media portrayals, global politics. How modern adaptations use these viewpoints and the romanticization to justify continued stereotypical, racist, sexist portrayals. All while connecting to historical events, introduce them to the narratives they DON'T know. That's a class that I think would work. A class with no easy answers. I'd enjoy that. But it wouldn't mean I'd call The Last of the Mohicans "problematic." I would not frame my enjoyment of anything at the expense of others. None of us should.

So now when I read a thread by someone detailing how a movie, a portrayal, made them feel, I listen to them. I take their word for it. Because it's not my experience, not my lane, and so it's important I listen. I see a lot of people responding to these threads with "well actually..." or tying themselves into knots trying to justify why it's still okay for them to like it. I try not to do that. I try to listen, and then just not. 

I still have some things I wrestle with. I will always love Star Wars. The original Superman. But when I try to watch them now I see the sexism. The lack of actors who are people of color, or queer, or not American or British. I see the casual racism, so often presented as a joke. I see actors that I now know were horrible human beings. So less and less I return to anything I grew up with. These things are hard, because we do connect movies and tv shows with certain things we grew up with, sometimes magical experiences, sometimes small bright spots. It can be hard to separate those very personal experiences with what we now know. But it's important. 

It's the old adage about opinions and people disagreeing.

No tv show, no movie, no actor, is ever going to be greater, more important than the people those things hurt.

The fact that people's humanity is so often up for debate is a thing that weighs on me, makes me sad. It is a small thing I can do.

Writing in a Pandemic

I've been trying to write throughout the pandemic with very little success. Part of it is that I did not realize how much I depended on long weekends and summers and breaks to get my scholarly writing done while balancing my teaching and service workload. I tend to need huge swaths of time to work. Days when I have nothing else to do, when I can just sit at my desk at 7a and have the whole day stretch ahead of me, dedicated to work. I especially need this dedicated time when I first start, when I'm doing the heavy analysis lifting, writing to think. I tend to need shorter chunks of time when I get to adding scholarship, but longer days to read through the scholarship. Editing and revising takes a shorter time, half a day the first pass, another half a day to type up. I like to have time in between so I can play with the pieces in my head, moving them like Tetris pieces, making sure it's the best fit. The last seven years I've published four journal articles and three book chapters in edited collections, with another coming out next year. I've done all this while working multiple jobs, juggling PhD work, and I would have told you that I had a system that worked for getting scholarly work done while balancing all of this.

But the last nine months have shown me that's not true. I've been trying and trying to get this chapter done the entire time and it seemed like every time I thought I had a handle on both the writing process and what I wanted to argue it slipped away from me. I've teaching Advanced Composition in the spring, an upper level English course required for other majors, so I've been thinking a lot about process, and modeling, what we write and how. So I thought I'd share a bit about how this process went now that I finally sent the chapter off to my co-editor for feedback.

I knew I wanted to write about Carol Clover's Final Girl and deal with the idea that her work on this is often a misreading of the Final Girl as some sort of "gurl power" figure. But I went back and forth on what to use to look at it. At first I thought I'd look at American Horror Story 1984, then thought about Final Girls (2015). Ultimately I settled on Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), revisiting the original Final Girl as a way of revisiting Clover's initial scholarship (1992, not the 1987 article). But that was really just a way in. 

This piece was written in a different way than anything else I've written, and it certainly changed more than anything else I've wrote. Part of my frustration was the last of solid, dedicated writing time, but a lot of it was I felt like I didn't know what I wanted to write, or rather I wanted to write lots of different things that were all similar but I couldn't make up my mind.

I never used to outline my writing, but during my dissertation my director suggested that I use the outline feature in Word to look at the first sentence of each paragraph to help me see the flow of my argument. Since then I've used outlining as one of my first steps of writing before I draft. I outline the topics, and as I draft I use the outline document as my basis so I can make sure I can keep the threads when it's so easy to get lost and veer off when drafting.

When I outline then draft I tend to be super wordy, 8,000-10,000 word chapters for 6,000 word pieces. I don't worry about this when writing, but once I draft I do like to jot down on the project folder what I see as the key ideas. In some ways this works the same as outlining, to keep me on track, but I also try to think of it as the takeaways. Everything for the project goes in this folder- outlines, notes, drafts, revisions, and the folder only gets thrown out/recycled once the article is published, so it contains everything. 

Because I did not have dedicated writing time all semester I kept outlining, revising the outline, then redoing it. It seemed to be the only space I had in my head. This meant I changed my argument a lot over the last months. It also helped though in that I was able to really refine my argument. I never veered away from the idea of the Final Girl, but I kept picking up and putting down ideas. It was a little frustrating, but ultimately the solution was to just finally sit down and draft. I ended up writing it all down, knowing that the heavy work would be done in revision.

In the folder I keep my latest, most final revision as well as my Post-Its and scrap paper notes.

When I revise I always print out my pages then hand write in a pretty color. I have to have a single color. If my pen runs out the revision process stops until I have a replacement pen. The highlighter color has to match the pen. I revise and write on the page, and draw doodles for larger inserts on the opposite page. When the insert is longer than what will fit on the opposite page I write on legal pads, and draw odd symbols or mark page numbers to track where they go.

Sometimes this system works. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes I can't see where I thought these parts fit, so part of revising is having to ask myself where it fits.

I draft in Google Docs until final, final when I export to Word for formatting, so I once I've hand revised, I type up all my notes page by page. One thing I've found though is that the delay between me writing the notes and typing it up ends up with some interesting things sometimes. Sometimes I can't read the note. Sometimes I decide that if I can't read the note it's not important and I just cut it. Sometimes I find better wordsmithing. I usually have multiple tabs of the document open especially as I move whole sections to improve flow and strengthen the argument. But my notes sometimes get muddled- where did the single star section go? Why are there two stars here and three stars there? I don't know why the logic of notes done the day before don't always transfer over. 

This chapter was 6,500 plus words before I added scholarship, so I knew when I revised I'd have to cut. There was a lot of background on Final Girls that I originally included, work about sequels, and comparisons to other Final Girls, but while I think all this stuff is interesting ultimately it did not belong in this chapter. These revisions, these cuts, are a part of the process I never thought I'd like but have come to love. When I can start to see the argument of the piece reveal itself, get condensed down to its purest form, that is one of my favorite parts now.

I also know I'm getting close when I start fiddling with the title, when what comes after the semi-colon starts solidifying. For me those listed parts are the subsections of the piece, the takeaways from the folder. So as I fiddle and play with the title, I pick up and set down the ideas that work or don't. I tend to fiddle with the title throughout the revision process, changing things, but once the title solidifies for me I know I'm close.

The last couple of weeks when I've finally had time to just sit down and write, no other appointments or obligations has been lovely. I love writing. I love this work. I missed doing it all semester. It reminded me too that being able to do this, be a professor, write, teach, is such a privilege and a gift.

I'll still have work to do on this chapter when I get notes back from my co-editor, and I'm currently working on revising our proposal for the collection. Knowing now that pandemic me doesn't have the schedule for academic writing, I'm scheduling accordingly. I'm trying to get both these things finished and the proposal off before we're back in class. Reading and providing feedback on the chapters that come in don't require me to have the same blocks of time as when I write, so that should all be fine this spring. I'm not planning on starting any other projects. This summer I'd be happy if I could revise my Guthlac article and send it somewhere else. But I'm not going to stress about it. There is stilla global pandemic. Teaching in this requires more out of me, and I'm not going to feel bad about that.

While I know I'll get notes on this chapter, I feel good about it. I think it does cool things, and I'm excited for how it fits in the collection, and look forward to you all seeing it.

Reflecting On Office Hours

In education you can set your clock by certain topics getting space at the beginning of the fall and spring semester. People will (wrongly) debate ableist tech policies, rah-rah for surveillance software, decry to dedication of students, complaining they lack "grit." Like many, I go involved in railing against these asinine comments at the beginning and now I just skip them. 

I think it is very important as an educator to constantly reflect on our own motivations, learning, practice. I think it's important that we be able to answer "what is our pedagogical reason for doing X?" in our classrooms. I think we should be crafting syllabi, choosing readings, revising and updating the primary and secondary texts we teach. I think it is our job to stay informed of what the conversations of the field are. I think too often we replicate the systems we came up and were taught in and rarely interogate them.

Especially the last few years it seems like office hours have become a place of where we can do better by our students. I've seen recommendations to call them "student hours" so students know the time is for them and not just when you're sitting in your office. I've seen professors make office hours mandatory so students can "see" how helpful they are. Some turn the hours into a workshop space. Some just want students to know their professors are resources. With so many classes and office hours moving online this semester professors have shared how they've set work times, like a lab, where students can work and ask questions. Some have set up Discord and Slack spaces that seem to lean more towards workshop spaces. Some professors offer actual workshops on Zoom, covering skills or common questions, and recording for any who can't attend. 

Every semester as part of my end of course reflection I ask students if they came to office hours, why or why not. I admit that I have not always paid as much attention to their answers as I should have. This semester their answers really hit me. Even though I had on campus office hours this semester, I rarely had students come in. Last year I often had students in my office, but it was usually just them dropping by and hanging out. Which I loved, but which also proved a bit problematic, because then when I students showed up wanting/needing help, they were facing a room full of students- a bit intimidating, and then if students didn't take the hint to leave, I had to tell them too. I was happy students felt comfortable being in my office, talking to me, but if I'd been that student in the doorway, I would have left rather than face that.  

Next semester I've moved all my office hours online. It just doesn't seem safe knowing what we know about how Covid spreads to sit in a 10x10 room with no/poor ventilation, even if masked. So I was already in a space to think/rethink office hours. So when I read my students answers to the office hours questions this semester I actually listened. And it got me thinking about what we as educators want office hours to do. We want students to take advantage of one on one help. We want them to practice/do the work of talking through ideas, forming an argument, revising, getting feedback. We want them to show engagement, curiosity, and use these things to stretch themselves in their work. We want them to show an interest.

I remember as an undergrad and graduate students being fascinated by the offices of my professors. I judged them based on how they did (or didn't) decorate their doors. I was always distracted by the books, the shelves, the layout. The rabbit warrens of a professional life on display. How professors placed their desks between me and them, setting clear boundaries. Professors with empty shelves. Professors with stacks of books versus them on the shelves (what was the secret? the system?). I've tried to make my office open and welcoming. I have snacks. And office supplies. And tea. And Kleenex And rubber ducks. A lot of this is a hold over from high school teaching, no one went hungry in my classroom. I want my office to be a safe, welcoming space, the same as I want my classrooom to be. I miss having my own classroom. 

When I read my students' answers to the office hours questions this semester I think I heard them in a different way. Few attended office hours and said so on their reflections. But it was what else they said that is what has stayed with me. When I asked why or why not they said overwhelmingly that they didn't feel the need to. They said I always answered their emailed questions quickly, always read and got drafts back fast, and they never needed to come to office hours. It was this "needed" that struck me. I also ask students about whether they regularly attended class, and if not, why or why not, and what I could have done more. Their answers to this and office hours had some overlap. Many students said they had to work so often could not come (to office hours or class). Many said that they had transportation issues. More said they had other responsibilities. Some said the times didn't work for them. In the past I've had students vote on my office hours to try and fix that but it didn't result in any more attendance in my office.

But here's the thing- none of them felt like these barriers interfered with them getting the help they needed. They all felt that they were able to get everything they needed from emailing me. Given their varying schedules, it certainly made sense. It got me thinking about office hours, their purpose, and what the technology of email does, and the ways that maybe I've been clinging to old ideas. It's a common complaint that students don't come to office hours. They don't realize what they're for. They don't take advantage of them. I think, reflecting on the list above of what WE as professors WANT them to be, that maybe not all those things are about serving the students. If I schedule workshop days into my classes, if it's the standard in my classes for students to send me drafts for feedback, if I answer all emails within 24 hours Monday through Friday, often quite faster, then what needs of my students are NOT being met?

We all know professors who don't care about teaching. We know professors who would not make an appearance on campus, do their jobs if not for that 10 or 15 hour office hours requirement. And these are horrible people who should not be teaching. But as with many things, are we setting rules and expectations 1) for antiquated ideas of what serving students look like and 2) as a way to make people do their jobs?

Too often these same people seem to like to frame students not attending office hours, "not taking advantage" like a personal failing. As though the student must not be dedicated or engaged enough to "care" about doing well in your class. First, not taking advantage smacks of some blechy you as savior crap. Second, it totally ignores the reality of the majority of our students. Even students who are full time and live on campus are juggling jobs and families and extra curricular responsibilities. They're not sitting around waiting for you to bless them with your expertise. And again- blech.

I'm not saying we should dump office hours. I have set virtual office hours for the spring. I'll continue to hold them when we return to campus. Maybe though we should ask about what we want them to do, what our students need them to do, and consider how we can meet those needs in other, better ways. If your students need  a model for thinking through an idea or paper then arrange for one on one conferences for them to do that. If you think your students need dedicated work time to complete an assignment then build that into your classes. If you want to set up a practice of drafting, feedback, and revision, then build that into your class. If you want to build a community of majors, alumni, professors, then you have to find a way to do that.

If the problem is faculty won't answer student emails, or show up, if you don't "make" them well that's a whole other issue. If you're at an institution where your professors won't prioritize teaching then you have a culture problem not an office hours one.

I think at least part of office hours is based in an antiquated idea of the sage on the stage- that students should come to the hallowed halls of your building, knock and hope they're admitted to your presence, and then supplicate themselves, basking in your knowledge. 

Yuck.

So I think next semester I'm going to stop asking about whether or not they attended office hours and why or why not. Instead I'm going to ask them about what they needed to succeed in class, what I did that helped, and what else I could have done. That is what I care about. That is what I want to make sure I'm doing.