Student Culture & Student Expectations

Posted on April 9, 2008
Filed Under Korea, education, esl & other teaching |

I recently posted about student expectations with regard to course difficulty. Students — the same ones — have been mentioning, again, how difficult my two content courses are. This is not surprising, really, since in one we’ve been discussing the contribution of African-American popular culture to mainstream American (and really, global) popular culture — in terms not just of tangible contributions like to the musical language, to language itself, to style, to abstract ideas like “cool,” but also how African-American culture (or certain understandings [and misunderstandings] of aspects of it) got taken up consciously by, say, the beats, as an explicit model for the formulation of rebellious, transgressive youth culture, and how this has reverberated in American culture ever since, and affected the development of other local youth cultures abroad. In the other, we’re still working our way through The Hacker Crackdown, and finally, student explications of the text are giving way to debates about the issues at hand: Constitutional rights, and whether one’s legal rights online ought to differ from one’s legal rights online, as well as why or how this matters. (I’ve been waiting for that to happen, and finally it is, and I couldn’t be happier.)

Really, things are getting really interesting, but of course, there are still some who are complaining that I’m being demanding. Not everyone — I had a chat with one student who was talking about how she’d been going home and looking related things up on her own, how she’d revisited elements of pop culture after the lectures I’ve given and they made more sense to her. (The Ted Danza/Whoopie Goldberg blackface incident, for example.) Another student, in her personal reaction to our class’s discussion of James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” confessed that she’s always had a bias against black people, for no obvious reason, and that reading Baldwin’s words, and seeing the images at the end of Bamboozled, drove home how wrong and baseless her attitudes were. That was one of those, “Woah,” moments. Yes, a bit of me wonders if she thinks that what I want to her, but from another part of me hope spring eternal that maybe someone had such a door as that opened up in my class.

Anyway, John — a guy with whom I was involved in theater productions in Saskatoon well over a decade ago — is teaching in Korea, and commented, in part, thus:

I’m not even certain that the expectations that class is going to be easy can be confined to Korea. Back in Canada, several of the professors I worked with complained about students approaching them with demands that their grades be raised. Some profs did, others didn’t. My favourite account of this was the professor who was approached with the line: “I’m smarter than this. I should have gotten higher than a 67%.” The professor’s reply: “Yes, you should have.”

Besides my immediate reaction, which was to grab that response and stick it in my back pocket, I began to reply when I found the comment I was typing had begun to take on the proportions and complexity of a post. So, instead, here are my thoughts on this.

Flux

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Comments

6 Responses to “Student Culture & Student Expectations”

  1. Mark on April 9th, 2008 9:42 pm

    Four seasons? Could you show your work on that particular equation? All I remember are looooooooong winters and all too brief summers.

    It’s an old trope (I’ve read it in Chesterton and Mencken) but a good one - the best traits or qualities that your culture lays claim too are frequently and paradoxically the traits that they fall short of the mark on.

  2. gordsellar on April 10th, 2008 12:48 am

    In Saskatchewan? Yeah, okay, I’ll grant your observation for Saskatchewan, with the caveat that there was a fall and a spring — they were, respectively, the temperate, cool, lovely week immediately before and after summer.

    Yeah, this makes sense — that cultures sell themselves most loudly on the traits that they’re most anxious about. The class in which we’ve been discussing the effect of African-American pop culture on generalized (”mainstream”) pop culture is turning, tomorrow, to a panel discussion (by students) of the anxieties in Korean society about what are perceived as “foreign” elements taken up by youth.

    (My lecture Tuesday was, in part, aimed at making the point that certain generations semi-consciously modeled their youth culture on imitations of what they thought African-Americans and other non-white minorities’ cultures were like. But the same is true of Korean youth culture — there’s tons of repackaging or wholsesale cargo-culting of foreign pop culture, just like in Canada, but with much more anxiety given the educational and societal focus on authentic “Koreanness.” Such as, for example, the moral panic over “foreign influence” in areas like Hong Ik University District, Seoul’s liveliest youth-nightlife/clubbing area. I’m looking forward to hearing what the students have to say about that.)

    I always meant to check out Chesterton — my father was into him, for some reason. I’ve always regretted not knowing enough about online booksellers to get him a copy of Chesterton’s The New Unhappy Lords when he asked me about it. Some kind of (now-)dated, but no doubt interesting, exposé of British politics.

  3. Mark on April 10th, 2008 12:52 am

    Chesterton’s journalism is interesting but…dated, and disposable. The Man Who Was Thursday and The Father Brown Omnibus are either minor or major classics depending on your tastes.

  4. gordsellar on April 10th, 2008 3:51 am

    Whaddaya know, both those books are available for free online. Maybe I’ll get to them sometime, even. I love having an ebook reader, downloading public domain (and creative commons) texts and reading them away from my PC is quite feasible. If it hasn’t yet paid for itself, it surely soon will…

  5. Mark on April 10th, 2008 4:20 am

    Father Brown is something you can dip into, while you’d be surprised how fast you’ll finish The Man Who Was Thursday.

  6. gordsellar on April 10th, 2008 11:21 am

    Cool… thanks!

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