Since I haven’t been participating up to the course standards, I’ve decided to post some observations I’ve made during, well, observation, over at PMS. I’m sitting in on an ELA class taught by Ms. Nicole Penn, and the students these past couple of weeks have been studying for the ELA examinations (which are actually taking place these next few days). Of course, the students are puzzled by the test itself, and resistant—rightfully so. For one thing, they aren’t even aware of why they have to take a test, and when Ms. Penn responded with as much depth and honesty as she could without veering away from her lesson that day, the student muttered, “I bet they don’t even have a reason.”

In an instance of one of life’s peculiar little coincidences, Ms. Penn used the below video of Malcolm X as a part of her lesson on note-taking. I read the autobiography in my Geoffrey Chaucer course, and am still perplexed by my professor’s decision to include it in the course, but the exposure to it was valuable; he’s a figure that has taken on a life of his own, beyond his words and his beliefs, more of a symbol than a human. This was precisely what Ms. Penn told me, that she valued the exposure above anything else, and she emphasized the fact that Malcolm was a man with beliefs that must be contextualized and evaluated within the parameters of history.

Malcolm is a remarkable speaker, with a caustic intelligence, and exposure is certainly valuable, especially to a group of predominantly students who are understood through identity-categories distinct from the normative “white”. He poses some valuable skills as an intellect, in particular the courage to assert his own history and sense of self in hostile conditions. However, the students were distracted by their unfamiliarity with the man himself: Was he a slave?  When was slavery? Is he joking? I understood Ms. Penn’s intentions, and I am on board with the exposure that she was providing; but the students needed some sort of exposure to the context that she herself noted as being vital. Technically speaking, a pre-assessment, with vocabulary and history, could have been very informative to the students, and just as useful to learning the art of note-taking. Regardless of the content, the skills stay more or less the same.