How Can You Know What You Don't Know?

It's finals week, and I am commenting on drafts and fielding last-minute students questions, about half of them strategic and engaged, and the other half disappointing queries about elements of the class, writing, argument so basic that I sort of wonder if I have taught the class at all. Yes, most students are doing well, at least by the modest standards of rubric and course, but my disatisfaction persists. Without it, of course, I couldn't teach at all. And this weekend's events in what passes for the real world helped me concentrate on it even further. A national anti-war veterans group sponsored "Winter Soldier 2008," a people's tribunal or testimony on the current wars meant to evoke the original Winter Soldier. So, yes, I heard much of it on KPFK and, despite it getting almost no coverage on corporate, mainstream media, NPR felt compelled to cover it briefly on Saturday morning. This was important to me because six or seven students are writing on PTSD and other veterans, in addition to it being, well, important for all sorts of reasons: the anniversary of the war, the blackout by commercial media, the responsiblity of citizenship and knowing how to talk about what is going on, Mr. Jones. Then, this morning, Monday, Amy Goodman covered some of the dismal highlights of the event and followed with an interview of Seymour Hirsch of My Lai and Abu Ghraib "fame." I had, indeed, advised several of my students who telephoned over the weekend of the hearings, actually asked them first if they had listened. No, of course they had not because, well, how would they have known to look, expect, anticipate such an event, ignored purposely by the behemoth news outfits? Not that students either watch or listen to those, or even know what corporate media is, or the critique required of history and democracy to embrace the phrase in any critical sense. In the seventies, largely due to the feminist movement, many on the left embraced the phrase "consciousness raising," sometimes called simply "CR." This is something different, of course, than academic inquiry or even curiosity. It assumes that you can know that there is a lot y ou don't know and that not knowing can hurt you. And that there is something useful in knowing beyond only possessing that knowledge. Most teachers understand this but I cannot think of circumstances where a failure to emphasize hurts us, and our students more than our failure to raise consciousness. How is it possible for our students to imagine, not to mention ourselves, that they are now something like experts on our post-911 topics when they don't have any real appreciation of what is happening in the world on the very same weekend when they are meant to be assembling an otherwise excellent simulacrum of that world?

All of this to say that I cannot teach this class again without more fully integrating the teaching of reality (I am pained to locate another word) into my teaching of argument and research. Again, if students listened to NPR and Pacifica for an hour two times weekly, I like to think that their literacy, curiosity, intellectual engagement, vocabulary, sense of reality would not only, well, improve (what an awful word!) but mean something. So, once again, I am struggling with how to make this happen. I once assigned them to listen, and made them report on blogs. This produced lots of useless comment about how "I never knew" and "interesting" but because I did not reinforce enough (?) or follow up with more or integrate into classroom it didn't seem to get the results I wanted. So, I am thinking about how. More soon.