Together

For the first time in fourteen or fifteen years of teaching, I’m doing it with someone else. That someone else also shares my house, my dog, and the baby currently crowding out my internal organs. J and I have talked for a few years about wanting to teach together, but this semester, we’ve finally taken the plunge, and I wanted to be sure to leave a record for myself about how this has worked and what it feels like on most days.

We’re teaching a class on the Civil War and the American imagination. It looks a lot like a course I would teach without J and it also looks a lot like a course he would teach without me. We’re reading novels, poems, autobiographies, and other primary sources. We’re also looking at movies, engravings, and photographs.

So far we’ve met four times as a class, twice to talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin and twice to talk about Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. The class is lively; all of the 23 students have been vocal and they actually talk to one another, instead of just to us. We’ve already contended with the rebel flag, “southern pride,” Uncle Tom, hardcore reenactors, and the general seepage of white supremacy in the South. We’re not moving in chronological order, which has J crawling out of his skin, but me feeling liberated from historiographical norms.

In just four classes, I’ve already had a chance to observe just how gendered our individual styles can be. After the first class, J observed that I seem to be “obsessed” with conveying my own authority. Damn straight. He also observed that I needed larger clothes to cloak my whale-like form from our students. Recovering from the punch to his midsection, he conceded that he has male privileges in the classroom. He doesn’t have to think about how his body is on display nor does he have to convey authority in order to forestall critiques of female intellectual incompetence.

It was during our meeting on Tuesday when I watched—during a particularly heated conversation about racial violence—as he knitted his brow and repeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to say about that.” He then dramatically fell back into his seat, whipped off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and loudly whispered (his choice mode of sounding smart and urgent), “I just don’t know how to respond to that.” It was, of course, all for effect. He did know how to respond, but he could recur to this rhetorical ploy because he is not liable to be considered an airhead or insufficiently mature. If I were to try it, I can only imagine the titters of students, “Does she know anything?” He can exercise a full range of approaches: the fool, the doubter, the dunce, the devil’s advocate. I, on the other hand, do indeed feel the need—but perhaps not the obsession—to convey authority.

I’ve also noticed that male students pose questions directly to Josh, but that’s an issue for another day....