Kofi #6

Reading the Bean chapter transported me back to my first semester as an undergraduate, when I took a class called "The Social Construction of Reality." It was a critical theory/philosophy class, and the first time I was reading writers like Foucault, Debois, and Marx (writers that I now consider foundational to my understanding of the world, power, and politics). However, as a new college student I had absolutely no idea how to read these writers; I didn't know their rhetorical contexts or cultural codes,. I was endlessly frustrated by the texts we were assigned, and no matter how much time I spent with the books I couldn't seem to crack their codes. (I also have a fundamental axe to grind with writers who write to obscure as opposed to illuminate, but that's a story for another time.) I believe there is a difference between challenging students without providing them with the tools to help themselves, and really teaching students. Reading this chapter made me realize that I could have benefitted from a teaching model that understood that I was doing something I had never done before (in a lot of ways, critical theory feels like an entirely different language than literary English). Rather than assuming that freshman Kofi automatically knew how to read difficult texts, something like Bean's "reading guide" for Stuart Hall or Walter Benjamin would have made a huge difference for me. Instead, I was scared off from theory until I picked it back up again late in my junior year!