It’s been about twelve weeks since I left my faculty job in South Africa. I really liked teaching there, partly because the weight of the Apartheid past was still so very present in Stellenbosch that, in an unexpected way, it made it feel especially worthwhile to teach critical social science. But it was just too far from my partner and our kid, who had stayed here. Obviously, we had explored different options. Leaving Stellenbosch ended up being the right thing, and I’m not ambivalent about it, even though I miss the teaching.

Here’s what I wrote on Facebook as I was leaving:

I made so many mistakes in the classroom this year, but for obscure reasons, I also really fell in love with teaching in South Africa, so much that I’m in tears now, writing this. My colleagues told me to be ambitious and teach what I thought was challenging, which was the opposite of my postdoc, where my boss said the students were pretty mediocre and not to expect much. Here I got less afraid of the classroom, and more in touch with which boundaries I need and which ones I don’t. I got better at being myself, at accepting the mistakes and fixing them, at being reflexive in front of the students, and at managing bad affects (mine & other people’s). Some students didn’t like my act and some loved it, and sometimes their critiques of my classes were spot on, and sometimes they came from detached kids who rarely showed up. I think I got better at hearing the critiques and doing my best and just feeling… alive. I don’t necessarily know what people thought or what they took away, and that indeterminacy is important. Teaching is a modest project. But I want to believe that when I was more present, they were more present too. Sometimes I could see it in their faces, I thought; and to my considerable delight, a lot of supposedly “bad students” sneakily turned out to be pretty good ethnographers.

To leave a place is to figure out how to acknowledge your losses, to learn what you will miss.

That experience also taught me, contrary to what I’d imagined, that mixed feelings are not the same thing as ambivalence. Ambivalence in the strong sense, I think, only emerges when mixed feelings are also in conflict with each other, or express some contradiction. But you can feel happy and sad at the same time without having this sense of unresolution that ambivalence provides. Ambivalence is a way of deferring the solutions to struggles, of keeping contradictions open (sometimes, of course, it is an permanent deferral). But me, I’m at peace with my mixed feelings.

Still, on a professional front, it was very hard to leave a teaching job without having another one figured out first. I hope I can find a new university position in America, but we’ll see, since the academic job market in my field is still pretty meager. I still think my work is good. But I’m still writing about precarity, and experiencing it.

We often think of precarity as meaning short-term work contracts, but oddly, when I was at Stellenbosch, I had a permanent academic position, but it was still precarious because the geography was so incompatible with my life realities. The trip, one way, was 25 hours and three flights, minimum.

I liked my colleagues and I’m happy that I’m going to stay affiliated with my department in Stellenbosch for the next few years. I’ll go back and visit, maybe even teach a short course.

Meanwhile, I’m doing much more childcare, and trying to finish my book about French disappointed utopians. There are a lot of coffeeshops in this neighborhood, which constitutes a sort of college town for Case Western Reserve University. Maybe I’ll write more about this neighborhood, with its odd class markers and its unusual (for America) degree of racial diversity. The spaces around universities always bring out my ethnographic instincts.

Being a bit anxious makes it easier to get up and get moving.

I’m staying in a basement flat, not even really a studio, since it has no kitchen, but only a bedroom, all white, which I’ve never decorated except with lamplight. By the bed there’s a door to a cave-like bathroom, which has no window, but does have a cranky exhaust fan barely able to remove the accumulation of moisture. Often when I go out, I leave the fan on.

Today I get up and find my glasses and, without even having coffee, sit down at my jumbled desk in the next room. The next room is technically not my apartment, but rather a furnished basement belonging to the larger house where my landlords live. (I do share their kitchen and some of the other living space.) In the basement, my desk is stashed in a corner, with a ridiculous ergonomic keyboard (the Kinesis Advantage), some piles of papers and notebooks, and a bit of music recording gear.

Anyway, I have to teach today at nine, but I want to send an Important Email beforehand, so I spend a while writing that. I puzzle over the wording. I probably also procrastinate a bit with Facebook and the news, but eleven hours later, that’s already become blurry in my memory.

An hour goes by, and then I have to I rush through getting ready, pausing for a minute to puzzle about an outfit that feels sufficiently Teacherly. I find a gray sweater with a wide collar, a checkered shirt, and my black Doc Martens, which have acquired an obscure but real emotional function in my teaching practice. They aren’t quite a talisman, but when I do the kind of teaching where you stand up in front of the room, they keep me more steady and feeling, very slightly, more invincible. Honestly, I have never felt very invincible in a classroom, but it’s still nice to fortify yourself a little against the world. As if you could be held together by the look.

Then a happy accident: I have exact change for the departmental coffee machine (which costs R10, about 80 cents), so I can go straight to work, pausing only to pack an apple and a granola bar. It’s after eight, and my bike tire needs air, so I risk driving — it is essentially a five minute drive without traffic, but sometimes traffic is quite slow in this small city. My lamentable current rental car, a Volkswagen Citi Golf, doesn’t like to start; often it stalls after ignition. If you give it more gas right after it starts, it seems to warm up after five or ten seconds. I haven’t driven stick for years, and I’ve gotten rusty about car coaxing techniques.

Soon the car is coaxed down the hill, past the fancy private schools, over the little river, past the Helderberg dormitory, past the town square. The pedestrians negotiate via hesitant glances over whether they will cross the street right in front of me. Once I make it to the Arts and Social Sciences building, I have about 25 minutes to put down my things, gulp my vending-machine coffee, print out my teaching materials, and chat with my colleague, R., who has generously agreed to co-teach with me today.

This month I’m teaching a short-form version of ethnographic methods, which meets for three hours, twice weekly, from 9am to noon. The class, for students in a 1-year graduate degree program called Honours, is technically called “qualitative methods,” but really I am trying to teach a class about what it means to interpret social situations. In the end, it’s not just “how we gather research materials,” it’s also what we make of them.

How does one interpret? How does one write an interpretation?

Well, here’s an interpretive question that I don’t know how to answer. At the door to the classroom, two minutes before nine, I find the students all clumped up in the hallway, waiting at the locked door to the classroom. Since my office is ten meters down the hall, I wonder why they didn’t come ask me earlier to help get the door open, instead of having to wait outside. But probably they sensed that opening a locked door was not their problem.

I get the door open, and people inside. It’s a room I haven’t taught in before: a “board room” with a massive oval table that keeps people facing each other, but far from each other. Everyone sits as far away from me as possible, but as the later arrivals show up, the gaps fill in.

We have a long and somewhat emotionally-intense-for-me class session on how to do interviews. It’s intense because I have never actually co-taught a class before, and it turns out that I have some minor but real disagreements with my coteacher, R., about interview technique, and about time management in the first part of class. He’s a lovely person and I instantly feel very guilty for my maladroit efforts to limit the time we spend on an opening discussion.

Here was the plan for the three hours of class (as I prepared it in advance):

1. Q&A about interview guide (15min)
2. Demo interviews in front of the class (45min)
   1. R. interviews Eli about a surprise topic, while students observe what happens interactionally
   2. Eli interviews R. about his “dream class”, while students write down dialogue as verbatim as possible
   3. Interview with a volunteer student, while students listen without taking notes, and take notes afterwards about what they can remember.
3. Break
4. Students practice interviewing each other in pairs
5. Students have time to notice themes and analyze their interviews (10min)
   
6. Group discussion of interviews and analysis

Amazingly, we mostly stick to the schedule. We only have about twenty minutes for the closing discussion, where I do a go-around to get everyone talking. By the time everyone has commented on their interviews with their classmates, class is just about over. We’ve largely tried to stress that interviewing demands real rapport, but it occurs to me at the last minute that, ethnographically, you can also learn a lot from awkward or interpersonally unpleasant moments. So I tell a story from my own fieldwork about that, but it’s a story about a somewhat dark moment, and I wish afterwards that I’d told something more light-hearted, to avoid ending class in a crestfallen mood.

It’s always hard to know what moods mean in the classroom and how they matter. But for me, when I’m teaching, often moods are all I have to go on when I’m there in the moment. So I do feel concerned that they are relatively positive.

It was also an intense class because when my colleague interviewed me in front of the students, he chose for his topic “Eli’s first impressions of Stellenbosch.” My first impressions of this place were quite overwhelming, having gone straight to a job interview from a 25 hour flight, and finding the city to be a beautiful, but quite racialized and unequal place. And while I could have decided to answer the questions a very guarded way, I decided to be fairly open, to not pay attention to the room of students watching us, and to look only into the eyes of my interviewer. At one point I remarked that there was a certain “masculinity of power” at the university, and then, like a good interviewer, R. asked what I meant by that. I found it hard to tackle a huge question like that without collapsing into a super academic register.

Afterwards, the students asked a very reasonable question: “Why did you still respond to questions that made you uncomfortable?”

There’s really no good answer to that. Sometimes we don’t extricate ourselves from awkwardness. Eventually, I say I think questions follow a logic like that of gift exchange, so that it’s just ritually hard to not respond to them, or even reciprocate.*

Anyway, after class eventually ends, time gets a lot more unstructured, and less hurried. I chat with my colleague quite a bit about how our class went. He liked it, he says, which I’m happy about, since he’s been teaching research methods for quite a while, and is a hard act to follow.

My memory gets vague about the rest of the day. I walk down the block and buy lunch at a grocery store; I do some classroom admin things; I chat a little bit online to my friend who teaches linguistic anthropology on a different continent; I feel overwhelmed by life but relieved to be done with class; I’m touched by the energy and seriousness of the class as a group; I leave my office door slightly open so that I can sense the flurries of motion in the department hallway.

As evening sets in, I sit down at my desk and write this, because I think it’s still valuable to have documents about everyday academic life. Now it’s quite late and everyone else has long since gone home. But since my family isn’t here in South Africa, I can indulge in working odd hours.

That is one version of a teaching day. Outside, it’s pitch black but the sky is clear and full of stars. I drive my little car home.

* Credit where it’s due: I think I got the analogy between questions and gift theory from a paper by Esther Goody, I suspect “Towards a Theory of Questions” from 1978, but I only ever had a photocopy and now I can’t find it to check!

A dozen women students showed up, no men. The class has 60 enrolled students, about 90% women overall. I was warned by my colleagues that only the truly committed students were likely to show up at the last lecture. The warning was sound.

I often come to the last day of a class with a written lecture, but this time it seemed to me that what I wanted to do was exemplify ethnographic analysis. So I started by telling two enigmatic stories from when I was an undergraduate student.

Here was the first:

Back in 2003, I was riding my bike through a desolate tiny town in the foothills of the Catskill mountains, looking for a place to stay the night. A group of kids was on the sidewalk, and they started talking to me as I rode past.
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
“What’s your name?”
“Eli!” I may have said; I’m not sure.
“Can I ride your bike?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
Then they asked a more surprising question:
“Are you gay?”
I just kept going.

The second story was even stranger.

I left work early on a hot summer day and went for a walk in a little river valley. After walking for a while, I sat down in a secluded spot, and covered my shoulders with a blanket to keep off the sunburn, because I was very pale.
Out of the woods, several kids appeared suddenly, shouting, trailed by a young dad who seemed to have little authority over them.
Frustrated by the lost solitude, I pulled the blanket up higher to cover my head and waited, hoping the kids would go away.
But instead they were intrigued.
“Who are you?” they asked. I didn’t answer.
“Maybe it’s an alien!” they shouted. “Maybe the aliens left it there!”
I laughed quietly at these remarks.
“Let’s throw a rock at it!” they shouted.
I said to myself: No one in their right mind would throw a rock at a total stranger under a blanket.
A rock hit me in the shoulder. Then I came out from under the blanket and stared angrily at the children. They stopped bothering me and eventually wandered off.

These stories seem to me mainly to testify to the weirdness and aggression that can emerge when people try to make sense of strangers, of the Other, of things they don’t understand. So we talked some about that in my class.

Afterwards, I asked my student to respond to a writing prompt: “What’s a question you wish someone would ask you?”

A lot of them seemed to interpret this as a Big Question, and pondered for a few minutes before writing anything. Afterwards, I read their responses out loud, letting people stay anonymous, which they preferred.

There was an odd feeling of shared vulnerability that I hadn’t really experienced before in a classroom. “If you’re an ethnographer and you can get people to share things like this with you, you’re doing something right,” I told them by way of a conclusion.

It’s Thursday, and my last class of the week is about twelve and a half hours away. Some part of me wants to start getting revved up now, since it still feels performative to teach, taking an energy that I try to build up in advance.

But a painless and oddly physical sense of disorientation has also set in, clouding the evening clock. It remains viscerally confusing to be alone in South Africa, teaching; my family is in America while I’m out here this year, as I’ve mentioned before. (This is very hard in completely obvious ways, which I won’t elaborate just now.)

In any event, I’ve been here the past three weeks, but the days and nights never quite learn to get along. Each day there’s too much coffee or too little, too little motion or too much, and never quite enough sleep, and even that, always disorganized. Time is like an outfit that you thought would fit, but when you got home, somehow it was slightly too small.

There’s an institutional reason for this over and above the existential factors; while elsewhere teaching usually confers a stable rhythm, here it’s a bonus source of disorientation, since here my class isn’t scheduled at the same time from one day to the next. I’m just teaching one class this quarter, which meets four days a week; twice it’s at noon, one day it’s at eight in the morning, which is inconveniently early, and one day it’s at nine. The evening before the early class, an unwelcome, unsleepy energy sets in.

I’m not an anxious teacher, as these things go. And increasing experience brings some kind of dedramatization. If my offhand math is right, I’ve taught about 160 university class sessions, cumulatively. It’s enough to start to be habit-forming; I’ve started to take certain parts for granted, like the basic logistics, the classroom “learning materials,” and the grading. While other parts — how to pace the material, how to adapt to diverse learning capacities — still feel like a work in progress.

But the odd thing about teaching is that, as soon as the first day of class was over, it stopped seeming like the first week of the term. Instead, it seems to me right now — this is Day 4 — that this class commenced at the birth of the universe and will continue on, exactly like this, for at least 525,000 years from now. I actually really love this class — teaching people how to do ethnography is probably my favorite thing to teach — so I don’t think this sense of timelessness is a form of angst, escapism, or complaint. Nevertheless, I don’t remember this degree of disorientation from previous classes.

It’s lucky that I have many alarm clocks.

In the meantime, the crickets are loudly keeping time, the last light is gone from the west, and I’m thinking about how to teach my students some feminist epistemology in the morning.

Here’s what I’ll look out at when I hastily print my teaching notes in the department office:

The ants are everywhere around the kitchen sink, swarming through the crack in the dishwasher door. Afterwards, every time you feel the tiniest itch, you suspect the ants of crawling on you.

I want to explain here to you how the arrival of the ants is not just a natural phenomenon. I want to discuss how it emerges from the local economy of housework, from the South African system of cheap domestic labor. And its antediluvian structures of race and gender. I want to say something about how those who purchase domestic labor may prefer to leave certain kinds of work, like dishwashing, for those who are paid to complete it. And about how that may inadvertently provide the ants with a food source.

But it’s hard for me to write here in detail about my household economy. There’s a lot that’s hard to talk about in this social context. Not that anyone tells you not to speak about it. They don’t need to.

The economy of domestic labor in South Africa — as in southern California — is completely visible but barely spoken about. Hidden in plain sight, the eye can take it in, but the tongue should be still.

It was hard for me to find a place to stay when I first got to Stellenbosch. So I was happy to find a little apartment. It’s in the basement of a big house overlooking the city. At night the city lights twinkle down in the valley. Proximity to the mountain is of course a form of class symbolism.

The neighborhood, Bo Dalsig, is one of the wealthiest in the country. All the houses have huge gates and security systems. The residents come and go in expensive cars. On weekday mornings, the domestic and yard workers climb the hill on foot.

At first, I walked to work. It took about 25 minutes. Then I bought a bike and it took 10. Then last week, my colleague lent me his spare car, which isn’t any faster than biking to get to work, but makes it much easier to come home with the groceries.

It’s the day before classes start, and I’m teaching a medium-sized lecture class about how to do ethnography. I’ve taught this topic before, a few years ago in Chicago, but this year I rewrote the syllabus to focus much more on analyzing ethnographic situations. The lectures are organized around a series of basic concepts: situations, projects, culture, ideology, representation, contradiction, practice, strategy, conflict, reflexivity, that sort of thing. Meanwhile the students will be doing fieldwork each week and talking about that in discussion sections. Here they’re called tutorials.

I’m looking forward to teaching, in spite of some minor anxiety about the first day of class. You never know quite what will happen in a class; you just know you’re physically invested in the outcome. Before I was a teacher, I didn’t realize how much one has to invest in the role and the ensuing performance. I’ve never been a stage actor, but I think of teaching as a cousin of acting.

One time an eminent, retired woman academic told me that she still got anxious before giving conference talks. And if you stop getting anxious, that’s a problem, she added. The same for teaching, perhaps. I’ve never had much stage fright, so for me, the anxiety is more a source of energy than of paralysis.

I’m writing about anxiety again because I really think it’s important — wait actually, I’ve said this before, so I can quote myself:

“It’s important for teachers who aren’t women to acknowledge their anxiety and vulnerability, given the preposterous gender ideals that still circulate in academic culture.”

Of course, the economy of teaching remains hard to write about publicly, especially in the present (i.e. not in hindsight), because there’s so much that goes into maintaining role separation between teachers and students, so much backstage work on both sides. And because the class and gender and race lines in many university systems are real, and remain very fraught. Not entirely unlike in the domestic work context.

But I’ll have to come back to this. It’s the day before the first class, so in the spirit of seriousness, I will go into my office on a Sunday morning and write my lecture. The first day of class, you end up spending half the time explaining the logistics anyway. There’s domestic labor in the classroom too: neatening things, making organization, clearing up cobwebs.

Since I’ve been teaching large lectures for the first time, I’ve had to think about grading in a new and larger-scale way. It’s different to teach 150 students than to teach 24 students. And in particular, I’ve been especially frustrated this week by how some of the traditional grading criteria — stylistic and textual evaluations of students’ writing — map too neatly onto sociological divides (race, class, native language, cultural capital). Different grading criteria are in order, ones that aren’t proxies for social origins.

But for now, I just wanted to post — at least for my own future reference — these little considerations from Postman and Weingartner’s 1969 classic Teaching as a Subversive Activity:

Each time you give a grade to a student, grade your own perception of that student.
The following questions might be useful:
1. To what extent does my own background block me from understanding the behavior of this student?
2. Are my own values greatly different from those of the student?
3. To what extent have I made an effort to understand how things look from this student’s point of view?
4. To what extent am I rewarding or penalizing the student for his acceptance or rejection of my interests?
5. To what extent am I rewarding a student for merely saying what I want to hear, whether or not he believes or understands what he is saying?