Activity 1: Let's Circle Back to Re-Read and Re-Engage more deeply in our Conversation
1. Re-read your entries and your colleagues' entries/replies to Module 4: Reflection on how you might integrate annotation and negotiation of meaning with your students.
2. Re-read the Reale "Hands-off Teaching" article and your colleagues' annotations/replies on the article. Try really hard NOT to add more annotations or replies, but we completely get it if you feel compelled!
3. Circle back to your Module 4: Reflection and read the posts and replies one more time.
4. Split into two breakout rooms and have a conversation around: What do you see between these two collections of texts? What do you wonder? Where is the conversation going? How is the process affecting you as a researching reader and writer?
5. We called an audible yesterday afternoon and decided to throw in another text -- just a few paragraphs -- about reading and about the power of 'No' from poet and author Anne Boyer. When you engage students in making connections, when we engage ourselves in making connections with them, it becomes a lot easier to discover and relate to additional texts which add to our original conversations. We'll go into the breakout rooms again and compare what Anne Boyer says about 'No' and how it connects to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Also see Anne Boyer's 'No' from same source: Links to an external site.
History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson in just not.
Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice being unbending, more so in a crowd. Cicero wrote cum tacent, clamant—“in silence they clamor”—and he was right: never mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.
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Some days my only certain we is this certain we that didn’t, that wouldn’t, whose bodies or spirits wouldn’t go along. That we slowed, stood around, blocked the way, kept a stone face when the others were complicit and smiling. And still we ghost, and no-show, and in the enigma of refusal, we find that we endogenously produce our own incapacity to even try, grow sick and depressed and motionless under all the merciless and circulatory conditions of all the capitalist yes and just can’t, even if we thought we really wanted to. This is as if a river, who saw the scale of the levees, decided that rather than try to exceed them, it would outwit them by drying up.
While it is true that refusal is a partner to death—I think it was Mary McCarthy who said even a gun to the head is merely an invitation—death is also a partner to refusal, as in often not the best option, but an option nonetheless. Death as refusal requires as its material only life, which if rendered cheap enough by the conditions that inspire the refusal, can become precious again when selectively and heroically deployed as a no.