I arrived in Houston today in the early afternoon, escaping the freezing rain (and weather drama) in Baltimore. This is my 7th NCTE annual convention: Detroit ‘98 (as a college student studying to be a teacher), Baltimore '01, Nashville ‘06, Philadelphia ‘09, Washington DC ‘14, Minneapolis ‘15, and now Houston ‘18. 2019 is in Baltimore!
In college, while studying to be a teacher at Michigan State University, my English Methods professor, Janet Swenson, inspired us to start a student chapter of the NCTE at MSU and had us go to the Detroit convention. That's what started me on the kick, but then it took my former department head, Charles Ellenbogen, to help corral us young teachers into doing our first presentation. It was on diversifying the curriculum and, since then, I've presented on translated texts, on John Steinbeck, on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and on Assessment in Shakespeare. The latter was done with the Folger Shakespeare Library, with whom I have two presentations this at #NCTE18: "Teaching Literature for Social Change Starts with Us" on Friday and "Two Brains Running: Teaching August Wilson and William Shakespeare" on Sunday morning. Folger Education has been expanding its reach beyond Shakespeare and both of our sessions underscore that.
Today, we arrived in time for a quick nap and then over to see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the kickoff speaker at the convention. I've taught Adichie's work for years, and have used both of her famous TED talks as part of instruction, but have never seen her speak before -- even when she was in Baltimore last year.
She was amazing.
Adichie began with an anecdote about some of her teachers, going back to kindergarten: a teacher who noted on a report card that she didn't work well when she was annoyed, and another who looked her wistfully and told her she felt things too strongly, knowing the pain and the joy that this quality would bring to her in her life.
She used both of these to express how important it is for children to feel seen by their teachers: this human connection that makes young people feel confident and loved and known.
Adichie expressed some disdain for the current STEM movement, saying while she's a fan of STEM (she quipped, "I did take an airplane here today."), she things it has crowded out the arts and literature. And it's through literature, she argues, that can teach students to have empathy, use imagine, and critically think. Reading lets people have two complex ideas in their heads at once and teaches them to resolve conflicts without killing people.
She touched on some of the themes of her earlier TED texts, such her "Danger of a Single Story," fleshing out ideas about how her college roommates thought she had stepped out of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, set in the 1890s. The symbols of Africa, to Americans, she thinks are the elephant or the hut, when they should be the bucket and the cell phone.
Adichie also critiqued the idea that students should never be made to feel uncomfortable, relating a story of the censorship of The Color Purple to seniors because there was sex in it. "It's important to be okay with discomfort," she said, to engage honestly with complex and uncomfortable issues," she said, arguing that the "obsessive safeness with what children should or should not read" should not be an issue.
The mother of a 3-year old child, Adichie spoke of her frustration with not being able to find books with black children in them, unless they were doing something "heroic." She wants books that humanize blackness and have black children doing "normal things," like getting in trouble, being curious, having fun.
A powerful anecdote about a well-meaning white bookstore attendant who said, when hearing that Adichie was looking for books featuring black children characters, that "Oh yes, I see why that would be important to you." As if, Adichie argues, that reading about people different than one's self wasn't important, either. She The world is wider and healthier when we are experiencing and internalizing all of our story.
Another anecdote illustrated her point as well. Recently the recipient of an honorary degree from a liberal arts college, Adichie described the genial, older white male limo driver who picked her up. Upon hearing she was a writer, the man said he was not a reader but, if he were, he was sure that he wouldn't read her books. The implicit but unspoken-by-both-parties conclusion was that it was because her books were about black things and woman things.
Adichie realized that she'd never think to herself that she'd never read a book by a white male for this reason, and it's because books by white males are considered normal and mainstream. She is often accused to be a writer who writes about identity, and she does claim that title, but all authors write about identity, she says. Only it's women and people of color who are accused of "only" doing this.
"To truly hear one another," she argued, "we need to expand the boundaries of everything," Adichie continues. Expanding does not mean throwing out the old -- she spoke of her love of Sons and Lovers (or was it Fathers and Sons?) -- but adding to it.
She ended on a somber note, referring to the murder of journalist Jamal Khassoggi by the Saudi government: "We live in a world where people are murdered because they write, because they tell stories. We cannot live in this world." But she reminded us that literature can and should be used to instruct and delight, and it was our (teachers') responsibility to facilitate this.
I spent much of Adichie's talk writing down quotes and just being in awe. I'm convinced she's one of the great thinkers of our time, and hearing and seeing her in all her resplendence and eloquence was captivating. NCTE whisked Adichie out into the hall, and I was too busy watching the rest of the presentations to realize that everyone would be signing up for autographs, so I didn't get one. But I did get with 10 feet of her, and saw her as she was led away, when I was smart and humane not to ask her to sign my copy of We Should All Be Feminists because I also took the same cross-country flight she did today (she lives in Maryland) and I was exhausted even without giving a talk and signing a few hundred books.
It was a great opening day at #ncte18.
from Epiphany in Baltimore https://ift.tt/2FpjCM3 Day 1 of #NCTE18: Seeing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak - Entrepreneur Generations
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