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Week 5 by mad and hopeless Mengmeng

 I really enjoyed the conversation in this week's readings, especially Kiang's thoughtful articulation of the dilemmas and resistance of a POC non-tenure faculty in university. 

1. As an ESL student, I have some experience with the ESL program at U Iowa. I was shocked (pleasantly surprised) by Kiang's piece that the teacher of an ESL class is a POC and has an ESL background. The fact that even wrestling with the questions of power and oppression in an ESL course happened there shows how terrible Iowa and many other ESL programs in the US are. ESL classes in Iowa teach assimilation, not resistance. They are taught by white teachers who LOVE other cultures and travel in the global south. This situation is just a small reflection of how the college education in Iowa and US is a neoliberal capitalist business, promoting a tokenist and patronizing diversity, instead of serving students of color and teaching critical thinking. The story about the POC faculty on the tenure track growing distance from his original activism saddens me. This is what the current tenure system does to individuals, to separate us, to break community. What can we do as graduate students, scholar-activist, and POC in this hostile environment that increasingly tries to oppress critical thinking and anti-racist pedagogy? 

2. This conversation about pedagogy applies so well to today's college political dynamic around COVID, like why isn't we allow to even discuss people's choice on wearing masks in classrooms?? It is surreal to me that we are demanded by the university to just pretend nothing has happened to the past two years with so many people lost their lives and continue to lose their lives. To see my students not wearing masks, I genuinely want to have a conversation with them on their reasons. Everyone will grow old one day (maybe not Jeff Bezos), so if young people today don't give a shit about elders and the immunocompromised who they will eventually become, how can we expect they practice anti-racism in their lives, since they are not gonna grow to a different race or be racialized in an oppressed way in a white supremacy society??? Or is COVID so politicalized in a polarized way, people just oppose the other side so badly that they don't even think?? Isn't the basic thing in education critical thinking???

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