Teaching_Literature_and_the_Bitter_Truth_about_Starbucks1
Teaching Literature and the
Bitter Truth about Starbucks
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CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG
I have spent far too much time in coffee shops, Starbucks in particular. My experiences in this caffeinated realm, reading, writing, grading, and talking to students, have shaped my thinking about two important ques-tions: What specific knowledge and skills, practical or theoretical, do the students think they are getting when they take my courses? What should they be able to do better after having taken them?
Making Literature Relevant
Why do I like Starbucks so much? As at any good bar, the baristas at Star-bucks, many of them students, get paid to listen to me talk about my re-search and interests. “What-cha reading Freeburg?” they say. “Y ou still writing that book on black-Africa-race stuff and Melville?” The student-baristas end up finding out a lot about my work and the courses I teach. “What do you teach anyway?” they often ask. From ten feet away another answers, “He teaches about race and black American writers, Whitman, Shakespeare, and that stuff. Y ou know, nothing that relates to the real world.”
What good is what I teach, and is it relevant to the real world? And why shouldn’t students ask me specific questions about what they can get
\/ The author is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana. A version of this paper was presented at the 2012 MLA convention in Seattle.
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Profession ? 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America25
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out of my courses on African American literature and culture and classic American novels? I actually wish more students, not fewer, would ask such questions about all their courses. Ultimately, after answering these ques-tions about content and purpose, many students who work at Starbucks and their friends show up in my courses.
T o engage students with literature and culture, I use Y ouT ube clips, vi-sual art, and my own dramatic readings of poetry. With this material, I create a multitextual, multimedia world of cultural literacy. Even though I do think the use of technology and rich cultural historical content can deepen a course, there are three things that I want students to know while they are taking my class: they cannot grab the syllabus and replicate what I do on their own; they cannot accomplish what we accomplish in class in an online course; and, most important, they learn specific skills that are central to my professional life as a scholar.
Thus, I make it explicit that they are acquiring the tools that define what it means to think critically about literature and culture, as well as what it means to be formally educated—a recognizable skill set, a kind of vocationalization. What I mean by vocationalization is giving our students an awareness of what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what it of-fers them beyond the loose rhetoric of critical thinking and writing skills. When a student leaves your class and then graduates, what should she or he be able to do better than when the student first showed up? We’ve fallen in love with Fredric Jameson’s phrase “always historicize” (9). By commit-ting to it, we focus on the richness of political content, social conflict, and literary form, but in this current job crisis, I’m advocating that we consider more seriously why we need a stronger sense of vocation in our courses. In the 2009 issue of Profession, Gerald Graff claims that “we need to so-cialize students into academic discourse—that if we do not, we are simply setting them up to fail—I mean not to expose them to petty academic de-bates but to give them a way into the intellectual world and the public con-versation of our culture from which many now are excluded” (74). Graff’s advocacy for teaching the conflicts, as content and method, is compelling. Like Graff, I am a major proponent for socializing students into the public argument over culture, but Graff does not emphasize sufficiently the need for reading and thinking and note-taking about objects of analysis before one enters critical debates. That is, discussing oppositional claims does not automatically give a detailed picture of how students develop their own opinions about texts. How do students give a purposeful account of their responses to texts? As they study a text, what do they choose to be impor-tant moments, and how do they distinguish them from other moments that also appear significant? While insisting on the importance of reading
CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG ||| 27 literary and social criticism, Graff attributes the origins of his own critical acumen, his “contradiction-spotting template,” to his practices of reading criticism (73). Coming from one of the most influential metacritics, one can hardly believe that the secret to his science is immersing oneself in critical debates. Whether this claim is precisely true or not, Graff’s self-assessment prompts questions: When we teach, what is our version of the spotting template? How are we using courses to equip students with their own interpretive lens and mode of critical praxis? Do you detail how this mission is occurring throughout your course, and do your students know what they are diligently working to cultivate?
So how do you help students recognize that they are trying to find ways to make refined, sophisticated, cogent, individual contributions—ones that show that they are listening to the professor, their classmates, and their own detailed notes while reading alone? I begin by showing them that trying to acquire these skills is important, that these skills are actually worth acquir-ing. I want students to see themselves not only as consumers of knowledge but also as people who understand themselves as fledgling producers of knowledge. I want them not just to earn a grade but also to define what it means to be educated through language and literature. T o complete my explanations to them, I reintroduce them to the form and substance of note-taking, the topics and purposes of response papers, reading practices and outcomes, and the rationales for small-group discussions.
As professors, we often take for granted much about what we do and how we do it—what our students should expect from our courses and, most important, how they use what they learn for themselves, others, local communities and businesses, and national and international institutions.
Asking Questions
In my introductory African American literature course, I include clips from the television show based on Aaron McGruder’s comic strip Boondocks. Like South Park, McGruder’s Boondocks makes fun of everybody and makes you convulse with guiltless laughter. The main characters are Robert Freeman (also called Grandad) and his grandchildren, Huey, a twelve-year-old black radical, and Riley, an eight-year-old wannabe gangsta. Robert has adopted his grandchildren, and they live in a large house in the suburbs. One of their frequent visitors is Uncle Ruckus (not related to them), an elderly, heavyset black handyman who hates black people because they are black and loves white people because they are white.
In the episode “The Story of Catcher Freeman,” Robert begins to tell the story of Catcher Freeman, a celebrated ancestor and black hero who
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freed slaves and led slave revolts. Grandad’s history mirrors the most pro-gressive or romanticized historical scholarship—in his report slaves were all savvy tricksters who manipulated their masters as they eagerly planned resistance and revolt. Catcher Freeman also has a romantic interest, Thelma, who was crucial to the plotting because she murdered the sellout slave as he tried to thwart the revolt and save the master.
When Grandad is finished telling the story, Huey is silent and Riley is skeptical, to say the least. Then, Uncle Ruckus shows up out of nowhere and says, “Did I hear someone talking about Catcher Freeman? Well first it wasn’t ‘Catcher Freeman,’ his name was Catch-a-free-man. White slave masters took a field slave and turned him into the greatest ‘slave hunter who ever lived.’” In Uncle Ruckus’s story, Catch-a-free-man was a beast who talked to dogs and was better at tracking down slaves than a blood-hound. In Ruckus’s version, slaves ate delicious, plentiful food and danced and crocheted without a care in the world. Thelma again plays a promi-nent role, but she’s not a revolutionary saint; she is, in Ruckus’s words, a “jezebel hussy” who seduces Catch-a into making sweet jungle love to distract him from the plotting slaves.
Finally, skeptical of both Grandad and Ruckus, Huey tries to find the real truth about Catcher Freeman by consulting the infallible Internet. He finds there was not an actual Catcher Freeman at all. Supposedly, Thelma leads a rebellion, and a sellout slave becomes the hero Catcher Freeman when he tries to shoot Thelma and shoots the master instead. The episode ends with Riley saying he wants to tell his own version that resembles a combination of Star Wars, Shaft, and a Lil Wayne music video.
My students can identify the various histories the episode deploys, in-cluding Ku Klux Klan pamphlets, black freedom writings, and the rich context of the United States under jim crow. All this historical background is useful for understanding “The Story of Catcher Freeman,” but I am more interested in other questions that the episode emphasizes: Can one tell a disinterested history about black heroes? How would you depict the relationship between how history is being told and the persona of the story t eller? What I want most out of my students initially is not a great an-swer but other questions: What do I need to know to answer this question? What materials or knowledge do I need? What intellectual groundwork needs to be done for me to come up with my analysis and conclusion? It is equally important for students to realize that being a good analyst requires coming up with their own questions. One student, for example, posed the question, If all the “Catcher Freeman” histories emphasize manly heroics, why do the stories revolve around Thelma? I asked the student to consider what pieces he would need to answer this question in a short essay—how
CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG ||| 29 would he choose between various phrases and scenes that might all appear relevant to his claims and interests?
I want to help students become self-aware of how they come up with their ideas, of what the specific differences are between what they think and the opinions of their classmates or the critics we’ve discussed. What I emphasize for my students is that they should see debate, difficulty, mys-tery, confusion, and enigmatic frustration not as places of retreat but as vehicles to say something interesting and unique.
Meeting Students’ Needs
T eaching literature in this way is rewarding and often fun. T o do it, one makes a lot of sacrifices. What I would like to hear is more discussions about how literature professors define the needs of their students and what they are doing to meet those needs. When I first started at the University of Illinois, I did not know the culture and had to figure out how to get what I wanted out of the students. Since then, in many introductory courses, to get the students to push themselves, I have to reward them in ways that I think college students should be above. In assessing what I think the students need, I have had to give up aspects of my approach to teaching I feel strongly about. For us, it may become necessary to vocationalize in new ways.
If we say we want to make our relevance visible and effective, how far are we willing to go to transform ourselves for our students, who really want to be fully informed and reaffirmed in their choice to study the humani-ties? There are many works of literature that profoundly express this sense of collective sacrifice that ultimately must occur individually. Throughout his career, James Baldwin discussed the idea of the “price of the ticket.” He repeatedly claimed that whites had to give up whiteness if America was truly going to be a free country (336). In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the Christian Ishmael turns idolater to deepen his relationship with the pagan Queequeg; in doing so, Ishmael gives up what he can of his church, self, and soul (52). Ishmael sacrifices a part of his identity—part of him must die so that his friendship with Queequeg can flourish. Ishmael says, “I must be united with him in his [form of worship]; . . . I must turn idolator” (52). As educators, what are our idols? What are the ways we think about ourselves and students that we are unwilling to part with? Sometimes it is precisely the ideas and practices where we are the most intransigent that are the places we should begin to change. I had to sacrifice the ways I thought my courses should be taught, and I imagine I will continue to evolve in this way. We do not have to accommodate the whims and c omplaints of
30 |||TEACHING LITERATURE AND THE BITTER TRUTH ABOUT STARBUCKS students and parents like some full-service cafeteria, but we do have to be aware of the specific ways that education in literature can enhance stu-dents’ life and work. I think we can both vocationalize and historicize in ways that will benefit the students and the profession. But making changes comes at a price, and I hope we’re willing to pay it.
Much of what I am telling you now, how I believe I have evolved as a teacher, came from doing my work at Starbucks. The bitter truth about Starbucks is obviously not just about the taste of black coffee. I do not want my students to continue to work at a coffee place when they graduate un-less they want to. If we do not help them understand better what it is that they are doing in our courses, then we undermine their potential success and ours. We should, especially for undergraduates, emphasize vocation more. We should fully grasp this emphasis to present the tools and options our fields offer in the most clear and cogent ways. What will make the students themselves bitter (whether or not they ever work at Starbucks) is the realization that we didn’t ask them to do enough.
WORKS CITED |/ Baldwin, James. “The Fire Next Time.” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. New Y ork: St. Martin’s, 1985. 333–79. Print.
Graff, Gerald. “Why How We Read T rumps What We Read.” Profession (2009): 66–74. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print.
“The Story of Catcher Freeman.” Boondocks. Cartoon Network, 28 Jan. 2008. T elevision.