Pockets of hope
Hope seems to some people so ridiculous in the current circumstances. I think their idea of hope is different from mine. For me, hope is not sitting back and waiting for good things to happen. It is about creating circumstances that maximize the chances for your desired outcome to happen. For instance, by being a good citizen now, and becoming very adept at physical distancing (aka “social distancing”). That creates conditions for us to hope that we can overcome this pandemic sooner rather than later.
Hope is also about finding spaces where you can claim back a little bit of control when you feel powerless, and inserting a tiny seed of the change you’d like to see. With patience, and some nurturing, the seeds will take hold and grow its roots in the cracks of the system, and expand that free space in between. And like the roots of a tree ruin the pavement, because who’s going to stop Mother Nature, the small seed sown in a pocket of hope will slowly start to chip away at the system. For me, that system has been grading. I hate grading. But I LOVE giving feedback to help students become better historians. Over the past few years I have changed my assignments, my teaching philosophy, and my style of interacting with students, to move away from the grading mindset, towards the idea of an intellectual journey. I’m not quite there yet, but I can already tell that my pocket has expanded considerably: I get excited about looking through student work, rather than trying to hide from a pile of essays or exams to grade with procrastination-cleaning. (I just realized this is the most likely explanation for the state of my house.)
I spent all day today looking through work students have done on their projects for the OER textbook for China’s Magical Creatures. This will be the second, expanded version, “now with added PANDEMIC!” We have limitations: not all texts that we want or that I would like to recommend are available to the students. (If anybody has a copy of Fengshen Yanyi in translation and wants to photograph some of the chapters with Daji, PLEASE contact me!) Students are working in very difficult circumstances: away from their peers, study groups, Writing Center, Academic Resource Center, away from their home away from home, and in conditions that appear for some far from conducive to intellectual exploration. And yet they are dreaming up magnificent things, about gender, foxes, terracotta warriors, Buddhist hell, tombs, calendrics and what not. It looks to me like our Pandemic version of the textbook will be a big step up from the first edition, against all odds. I’d like to think I created the right conditions for this to happen, with “project bites” to munch away at the elephant of creating a book chapter, by doing it one bite at a time. But it is in the end the students who decided that this virus is not going to dampen their enthusiasm for Chinese Weird Things. Their tenacity in the face of adversity is amazing (and incidentally reminds me of what I wrote about rhizomes a good while back).
And you know what else is a little pocket of hope? My Korean History class is also working on an OER Pressbooks project, and what I’ve seen there looks equally awesome!