End of Year Gallery Walk
Final Zines, Teaching Milestones, Wild Futures
The school year has ended, my 5th in public schools.
And it is probably my 12th year of teaching, counting college teaching.
This was the first year I was a department chair for English. This was the first year I taught an Honors English high school class, designing the course from beginning to end.
But this year I also completed the two year “induction” course program which allowed me to “clear” my credential. This is the San Diego Unified School District version of tenure, more or less. It’s a long, complicated haul and involving a lot of paperwork and checking boxes and zoom sessions. Ultimately, the whole process was life-affirming, despite my many complaints. Teaching has always been a spiritual practice for me. More so, these last couple years, so I’ve tried to apply this lens, when I can, to a lot of the busywork that comes with it.
All told, I feel accomplished, I feel lucky, I feel tired, I feel rested, too. I feel inspired, above all.
Moreover, I feel the imperative to remain inspired is more important than ever. For the powers that overtly reign over us, not to mention the more insidious ones that live in our technologies, patterns, and ideologies, do not want an inspired people. So I will keep trying to resist and spread inspiration, too, where I can.
Mostly I feel in awe of the students I got to work with this year. And especially in semester two, where I taught the first Honors English classes at my high school, LMEC. Most of these students I already knew to some degree. The smaller classes and the emphasis on more challenging topics and activities created a warmth and a social-emotional and intellectual intimacy I’ve never really experienced in a teaching environment before. Not to mention lots of cathartic laughter. These students became integral contributors to building a vital knowledge community. They were young people whose ideas, jokes, stories, struggles, and motivations were fundamental to how I think about the world. I will miss them a lot and I will miss these amazing classes we created together.
Our final unit of the year was on Art, Rhetoric, and Persuasive Writing.
For our final writing assignment, students spent time analyzing this quote from James Baldwin from his essential essay, “A Talk to Teachers” - (which is really a talk to anyone at all concerned with education and civic responsibility):
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk.”
And for their final CREATIVE projects, they spent a couple weeks creating “zines” but this time we used more supplies and art tools than last year. I also wasn’t exactly anticipating such an enthusiastic and obsessively driven bunch of creators. They had four options which offered a lot of creative freedom. Whatever choice they picked, students had to include personal evidence, research, rhetorical devices, and design to compel/persuade readers to take a deeper interest in their topic.
The four options were: create a fanzine based on a topic that you love/are deeply passionate about, create a syllabus for a class you would want to take or teach, design a museum based on objects that have value to you and you wish to preserve for the future, and create an “oracle” deck for psychological consultation using images, writing, and commentary. Most students chose the fanzine options, some picked the syllabus, a few artistically driven souls chose the oracle deck, and one student chose the museum option.
I love these options, though, because they are so malleable and flexible; indeed, a lot of my own writing/art projects and explorations of experimental writing include them.
I also love them because they involve both personal enthusiasms and private world-making along with rhetorical connections to others and community building. This project is an aspect of “Assemblage Thinking.” (An idea I want to revitalize and explore more of in terms of education.)
More importantly, it brought a lot of joy, immersive creativity, a sense of accomplishment, and the honing of intuition and imagination towards the creation of something unique, talismanic, and one-of-a-kind. I also learned a lot from reading these zines. Below is a small array of some noteworthy ones! More notes on all this later, but please enjoy this amazing work created by my extraordinary students!
