Censor-shit...or is it sense-your-shit?

Yesterday, Halloween was the anniversary of my Grandmother's death. Enid. She died on Halloween, 1989. This was my first emotional kiss with death. Ever since then, Halloween has been a very vulnerable day for me. As usual, I went to work, I hung out with my middle schoolers in my after school program. We had a little Halloween Party, I gave out their gift bags and gave them plenty of cake. They brought me such a quiet joy--they will never know. Man, just watching the light on their faces when I heaped big chunks of cake onto their flimsy plates was healing enough for me. I love serving my kids.

On the way home from work yesterday, it started coming down. I felt like a DJ was in my throat, scratching away. My limbs: weak branches holding up my body. My head: heavy bowling ball with eye sockets for holes. By the time I got home, I had a full blown cold. I think it may even be the flu. My body aches and creaks like a rocking chair.

I called out of work today. I don't know the last time i called out of work due to illness. This has given me much needed time to write about something that's been on my mind, something that occured last week.

I teach a spoken word class at a college in Brooklyn. The majority of my students (99% of them) are seniors in high school. The director of the African American Studetns department at the College came last week to observe my class and give my students an evaluation of my teaching.

I felt a little nervous about that because I'm not used to people looking over my shoulder, but I'm confident about my teaching. The only thing is, I'm a very liberal teacher; i give my students a lot of room to express themselvses. I've been called "edgy." I'm not conservative by any means. I definately can't be especially with teaching urban youth.

So, point blank, if someone is going to observe my class, I'm not going to mold my classroom dynamic into something I think they want to see. This person is walking into the space that I've created, my four-walled universe. So on Thursday, she came. And she saw.

She saw me put a halfway finished bottle of Bacardi gold in the middle of the floor, among a few other objects and ask my students to a write a poem from the perspective of one those objects. Of course, many of them chose the Bacardi. It also just so happened that my students' poems were a little more sultry than usual during our weekly open mic session and I guess I didn't help things by playing some NAS on the boombox.

After class, she asked me if we could meet for a little while. Oh shit, I thought. I knew this was trouble. We met for over an hour, during which she expressed that she wasn't happy with the sexually explicit content of some of my students' poems and that this is a university setting and those poems are not appropriate for the University classroom. She also raised an eye brow at me playing the NAS song in which he cursed and used the "n-word" and she asked me why I didn't put such atrocities into context during the discussion of his work.

I replied, "well, there's many ways to skin a cat." She raised an eyebrow.

I was completely honest with her. I told her that I don't restrict my students from any subject matter and from any language use. I told her that I've given them the freedom to use profanity in their poems, so if she's going to blame anyone for their use of language, then blame me, because they asked in the beginning of the semester and I said "okay." I told her that I run a censorship-free classroom, that in order to create a safe space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, I made a conscious decision not to give them any restrictions, regardless of my own aesthetic.

Personally, I don't like erotic pieces. Never have, probably never will. Sex poems are just not my cup of Earl Gray. But if my students write it, then they write it. I'm not going to impose my aeshetic on them in that way. I mean let's face it: teaching in general is an imposition of many sorts. For instance, the moment I encourage them to use images in their work, I'm imposing my aesthetic, because not everyone thinks the use of the image in poetry is the key to good poetry. Language poets come to mind here. Some people craft their poems around sound, not image. So, yes, encouraging them to use imagery is an imposition of sorts from a craft standpoint. That's unavoidable. But, I definately try not to impose what they can and can't write about.

Needless to say, she and I did not agree at all on a few things. She's of a different generation and from a different school of thought . I find her conservative and I'm the opposite: that's the bottom line. I told her that next week I will tell my students how she felt about some of their poems. I don't think I'm going to tell them to stop writing with profanity or sexual content; I'm going to express to them how she felt and I'm going to give them the choice.

On a good note, she was full of compliments about my teaching style, the safe, comfortable atmosphere of my classroom, the lesson, and the writing exercise that I gave them on personification. She said that out of all the spoken word classes she's observed in the past three years, that was by far the best one she's seen. So on a good note, it wasn't all altercation and clashing of horns.

Though I think I held my ground, I felt a little shaken during our talk because seldom encounter this situation. I've been spoiled by my own luck: i'm not used to having bosses who act like bosses. I'm not used to people looking over my shoulder and telling me how to run my classroom, my program, my shit. I know I've been fortunate thus far and that more of this is probably to come in my crystal ball future. During our meeting, I started to second-guess myself and my whole pedagogy. I started thinking, "Maybe i am taking the wrong approach. Maybe I do need to tone my shit down. Maybe I am a trouble maker."

And then she made the mistake of letting me read their evaluations-- incredibly re-affirming. My students' evaluations of me were stellar. My students love me and their work as a whole has improved drastically in our seven/eight weeks together, which is all I fucking care about to be entirely honest. I came to that realization as i was reading their comments. All this administration shit can kiss my ass. What matters to me and what has always mattered to me is the teaching itself. I'm not going to spend any extra energy trying to impress my higher-ups or trying to make them feel comfortable with my big-haired presence in their badly-lit, badly-ventilated classrooms. I have a duty to encourage my students to write their hearts, their lives, to represent their generation accurately and adequately. It may mean cursing and it may mean some breaking of beds but take me or leave me. All this other beaurocratic shit about pleasing the funders is for the crows. I've never been that "safe" teacher and I'm not going to start now. The most important thing to me are my students, the rolling up of the sleeves that is the teaching experience, the *work* itself. And fuck all the rest.