The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 18

I gave my first and only lecture of the semester last week. Was supposed to be at Bard College at Simon’s Rock as a participant in their Neoliberalism seminar. Participated virtually instead. My first shot at the virtual teaching thing.

Here are quick thoughts. As far as interacting with students, I think that people who are comfortable with an informal lecture style, who don’t have a problem with the appearance at least of close face to face interactions will do fine. I gave them a paper but because I gave it to them so late—I really wasn’t able to get my head right work wise until I wrote last week’s newsletter—I recorded a keynote lecture (first time I’d done that) and sent it to them. Then spent some time talking through it and finished with questions. I’m pretty sure that was really the first time any of us (me, the two professors who led the seminar) had done this so I made sure to begin by acknowledging the elephant in the room—the world as we know it is over, and we can talk about that, but right now we’re going to do this class thing.

Having done this makes me want to double down on something I brought up last week. I think this presents a great opportunity to extend the reach of our classrooms to broader populations.

With this said there are a few problems. It isn’t a good fit for people who really need structure and can’t suspend disbelief enough to get into a flow state. At a certain point in time I knew that I was in my basement, with my 20 year old walking around in pajamas on the way to the shower, my 17 year old going to the other desktop to work on a project, my DJ equipment visible behind me…but I was able to put all of that aside and act like none of that was going on. Act like I was in front of them in Massachusetts, comfortable in my own skin.

The tech all worked perfectly, but if somehow some aspect of it would’ve broken down, I’d have been able to crack a few jokes about it, acknowledge that there were going to be some technical challenges, and roll like everything was cool. There are all sorts of things I’m pretty horrible at, teaching wise, but being able to be comfortable and talk to people like it’s all good while explaining complex phenomenon?

That I can do.

People who need a lot of control over their environment and can’t quite suspend their disbelief? It’s not a good fit.

Further, there’s a larger challenge.

A range of schools are moving to online teaching in general as a way to increase “profits” (without the quotes in the case of something like the University of Phoenix with the quotes in the case of purportedly not-for-profit universities like Hopkins or the University of Maryland, College Park). Particularly if the lectures are being recorded and maintained separately, the only thing you’re paying for in overhead costs is the teacher and bandwidth. The student isn’t physically present on a campus that somehow has to be maintained, the student isn’t using the university’s computer equipment. That’s a dynamic that’s ripe for exploitation, particularly in a state like Maryland which doesn’t allow faculty to organize in certain ways.

And finally the two problems above are faculty-centered.

This doesn’t begin to get at two problems from the student perspective. The first is that just as there are some faculty that aren’t cut out for teaching, some students simply don’t learn well through a screen. They need some type of interaction that goes beyond the laptop. And then there are time-related problems (students are dispersed and some are on different schedules) combined with other sorts of resource problems (learning while at home creates all sorts of issues from students who aren’t from middle to high income backgrounds in general and house-insecure families more generally).

Suffice it to say this bears watching. It was good to be in front of students, I find that even though I needed the sabbatical I really need to be in front of students to talk about this work. But we can’t just engage in this new teaching dynamic without somehow taking all of the rest into consideration.

….

On Friday I was out, so I decided to take my camera and do some shooting. A range of places were empty, because they’d been closed.

But there were two places that weren’t.

The first was the Penn-North metro stop. The second was the Lexington Market Metro stop. In both cases it was as if it were a normal day. Well over two dozen folk hanging out, with some waiting for the bus, others just out and about. No social distance at all.

To be frank I was so taken aback, that the first thing I did after I was done was get a drink at a safe distance from a friend.

My first take was that there are, broadly speaking, two populations. One population believing in the news, practicing social distance, the other not believing—with this population being bifurcated. There’s a white ex-urban population that gets most of its information from Fox News and Trump…their trust in Trump leads them to be virus skeptics (I’ve actually one black friend in this category). Then there’s a black urban lower-income population that doesn’t support Trump at all but doesn’t believe fully in the virus either, perhaps because it doesn’t infect blacks.

This take isn’t right for a couple of reasons.

First, it ignores the broad swath of people violating social distance norms in private or in quasi-private spaces—just yesterday a white Baltimore DJ was arrested for hosting a private party broadcast on facebook with over sixty people. A friend of mine saw a group of students probably connected to Hopkins having a bbq in their backyard. Can’t see those folk at all. They will begin to appear in statistics and perhaps in networks.

Second, it ignores the reality that at least for the black lower-income urban population, there are a set of structural conditions that make it difficult if not impossible for them to stay in place—if they have homes they aren’t livable in the same way. Further the distance BETWEEN homes is nonexistent. Then if they have jobs those jobs don’t allow them to work from home.

We’ve already begun to see broad swaths of the country condemned as being responsible for the spread of the rest. New York City, New Orleans, Detroit, soon Baltimore. This is just the beginning. There’s a reason Biden trails Trump in the enthusiasm category.

….

On Twitter there’s a thread (I was tagged by Jairus Grove) asking folks to chime in on the music they’re listening to to get them through this time.

I have been listening to music….but it’s all DJ’d. I listened to QuestLove (instagram) for example from around 10pm last night to….4am this morning. Playing nothing but Stevie Wonder. I listened to DJ Vince Adams (facebook) before that providing a house music set.

That’s what’s getting me through. Being live with QuestLove as Stevie Wonder calls him on his cell was, kind of bonkers to be honest. Like I was there.

If I did, I’d probably listen to the following:

Brittany Howard (the Alabama Shakes vocalist has a new album)

Pat Metheny (listening to America Undefined on his new From This Place album as a result of this question right now—beautiful. There’s also a 58 minute long version of To The End of the World that’s probably a simple loop I’d check out.)

Kamasi Washington (been listening to him for what seems like a million years so that’s cheating, but whatever)

So including the DJs (and I’d throw in D-Nice and my man Rontronik, both on instagram) that’s seven.     If any of you wants in on the next virtual party I host let me know.

….

“We’re all home feeling existential.” —Nicole Petefish

Nicole Petefish is one of my former students. Making a way as best as she and her mom can in Queens right now. I think this quote kind of gets at it, don’t you?

I’m going to leave it there. More to talk about, but right now, I’ve got to make dinner. And breathe. Make sure you do the same, so we’re all here next week.