The Patron Saint of Superheroes

My university, like most universities across the country and globe, is struggling with a range of questions about how to operate during the pandemic this coming fall. I’d like to address two of those questions:

1) Is a zoom classroom inferior to a traditional classroom?

2) Should professors decide whether to conduct their classes traditionally or by zoom?

The short answers are: no and yes.

First an admission: I was on sabbatical this year and so avoided the staggering task of pivoting mid-semester and turning traditional courses into remote courses. I did observe many of my colleagues (including my spouse) and a few students (including my son who finished the last quarter of his first year at Haverford at our dining room table) make the transition, and the census seems to be: online classes kinda suck.

But of course that was the census. How could a course shoehorned mid-stride into a format unfamiliar to both the teacher and the students work as well as the intended format? Taking that very specific context of suckiness as evidence that online courses therefore are necessarily sucky would be like listening to a novice during a first piano lesson and concluding that pianos are godawful noise-machines.

If you want to know what a non-sucky zoom class looks like, start by looking at zoom. If you instead start with your traditional classroom lessons and try to adapt them to zoom, suckiness will ensue. Find out what is uniquely effective about zoom and then build your lesson around those features.

Here’s an example. I recently learned that the whiteboard allows everyone to access it simultaneously. I can’t stress enough how unbelievably cool that is. The first time I made a tiny little check mark during a zoom meeting was the first time I felt like a fully present participant and not just a multi-tasker giving the person talking a fraction of my attention as I’m hidden by the looked-at-but-not-seen weirdness of the videocam.

The pedagogical implications are even cooler. Here are two:

First day of zoom class, students enter to see each of their names typed on the whiteboard in a different color/style with the instruction to “check in” by selecting the same color/style and drawing a check next to their name. That’s now their identifying color/style for the rest of the semester. Whenever I start a new whiteboard for a discussion segment, we’ll begin with an instant “check in” along the margin. Then whatever they place on the whiteboard (a passage from the reading that supports their interpretation, a circle or underline to isolate a phrase from a longer passage that I placed there) everyone recognizes it as belonging to the specific student. And these visual interactions are happening in conjunction with the regular verbal discussion, making the zoom discussion not a second-rate imitation but its own unique animal.

Here’s a goofier micro-lesson for getting everyone’s attention synced. Each student is assigned one facial feature (left ear, mouth, right eyebrow, etc.) and when I say “now,” they draw simultaneously to create a one-second class portrait. I’ll save one portrait from each day (did I mention you can save your whiteboards?) and create a slideshow for the last day of class. This is my own doodle, not a class portrait, but it gives you a tiny hint of the possibilities:

There are so many more ways to capitalize on features:

polling (pre-plan a sequence to weave through discussion, starting with a fully anonymous reading quiz)

backgrounds (for homework students select passages—or images if it’s one of my comics classes—from the reading and have the screenshots ready to display behind their heads)

screen sharing (yes, everyone can finally all be one the same page at the same time),

break-out rooms (AKA, “small group work,” a core to my teaching since the early 90s),

I could go on, but you get the point: Build from the tech up.

Which brings me to the second question: should professors decide whether to zoom or not?

My school has created a doctor-signed HR form for professors at high-risk for CV-19 to receive permission to not meet with classes in-person. That’s great, but zoom isn’t primarily an emergency teaching tool. It’s just a teaching tool. Plus CV-19 doesn’t apply only to zoom teaching. Traditional teaching won’t be traditional either.

A CV-19 classroom will require teachers and students to wear masks and to stay six feet apart. How do you get students into small groups while circulating between them to monitor and answer questions? You don’t. Zoom break-out rooms are pedagogically better. If you think running a discussion on zoom is clumsy, how will it go when everyone has to shout from behind masks? I like to pull my classes into tight circles, but the minimum circumference for a fifteen-person CV-19 seminar is 120 feet. Does anyone seriously think that’s better than a grid of unmasked close-ups on a zoom screen?

Happily my school included this statement in our “Returning to the Workplace” guidelines:

“The university recognizes that a hallmark of a W&L education is the personal relationships between faculty to students. These relationships are typically fostered through the in-person classroom experience, and to the extent that students are able to return to campus, in-person instruction is the preferred method of delivery. However, as has always been the case, all faculty may alter their pedagogical methods to include a range of strategies that ensure an interactive and high-quality offering. This flexibility is not altered by these guidelines. If uncertain, faculty should continue to consult with their department head and dean on such approaches.”

Since I’m now vice-head (or what I’ve been calling “helper chair”) of my English department, I invite my colleagues to consult with me if they’re uncertain whether zoom approaches can achieve interactive and high-quality pedagogy better than traditional approaches used in the non-typical and non-preferred constraints of in-person CV-19 classrooms.

But whatever they decide, the decision to zoom or not to zoom is theirs to make.

From my Washington and Lee English Department:

Dear Members of our Community,

In September of 2017, the English Department published a statement to our students in which we condemned the neo-Nazi rhetoric and violence on display in Charlottesville earlier that summer. We still denounce white supremacy and the overt and insidious ways it operates, on our own campus and throughout the United States. This includes state-sanctioned white supremacist police violence, the deadly consequences of which resulted in the recent killings of Breonna Taylor, Manuel Ellis, Tony McDade, and George Floyd. The alarming frequency of these murders—to say nothing of the gross lack of accountability—must end. The clear inequities experienced by members of underrepresented and vulnerable groups, which are deliberate in a world organized by white supremacy, must end. The stakes are too dear to wait any longer. The current protests around the US and the globe show that we are not alone in this call for a more just world.

As educators, we are responsible for curating and protecting spaces of learning. As such, we have a responsibility to eradicate racism and prejudice from such spaces. We encourage our students to understand the world as a consequence of violent histories of race and racism, of slavery, of settler colonialism, and of prejudice on the basis of color, nation, custom, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability. In short, we challenge them to consider the many forms that policing can take. As literary critics and creative writers, we know that language holds the potential for disrupting racist ideologies, but we should not ignore the threat that language and hateful rhetoric pose in perpetuating racist systems and beliefs. We teach our students to be careful readers, to be thoughtful in their critiques, and to recognize the impact that they can have on their world.

We affirm the moral bare minimum: Black lives matter. But such an affirmation must only be the beginning of a more thorough process of dismantling the systems of oppression. We recognize and support those who take stands against racial injustice and demand another world. This includes protesters, of course, but also those who engage in the quotidian, unglamorous work of organizing, of providing care for the marginalized, of holding things together while so many go on about their lives. Indeed, care-work holds great potential to imagine a way forward. All of us will need to play roles in bringing forth a new world, but we honor those who have risked everything to show the way.

When we teach writing, we often tell our students that a conclusion is an excellent place to imagine what comes next. And in crafting this statement, we aim for it to be backed by action and for it to outline our next steps. Because lasting change arises only from group efforts, we wish to recognize and to support the work being done by members of our Lexington community, the greater Rockbridge area, and the state of Virginia.

To that end, we have collected more than $1000 for the Rockbridge County NAACP and their recently launched Irma Thompson Educators of Color Initiative. This decision is motivated by our wish to aid people who are already engaged in our community, have assessed a need, and have facilitated a response. Established in 2020, the Irma Thompson Initiative assists teachers, counselors, school psychologists and administrators of color with moving expenses, housing, or other job-related expenditures. It is offered as part of a broader effort to help recruit and support educators of color moving to the area, and to promote diversity in the county and cities’ schools.

We have also collected more than $1000 for the Richmond Community Bail Fund. Data concerning pretrial detention and cash bail system demonstrates stark inequity. On a given day, nearly half a million people sit in pretrial detention, separated from their communities and unable to live their lives despite not being convicted of a crime—all because they are unable to pay for the privilege of awaiting trial at home. The cash bail system contributes to the prison industrial complex and does irrevocable, long-term harm. When you take into account Black men ages 18-29 receive significantly higher bail than all other ethnic and racial groups for comparable offenses, the consequences are staggering. The Richmond Community Bail Fund works to help those a system has failed.

While we have opted for donation, there are many ways to respond to this crisis. We have included links below if you would like to learn more about these organizations. Change comes when we work at multiple scales, and we have chosen to respond at the local and state level. If you would like to learn more at a national level and find ways to get involved, we encourage you to visit blacklivesmatter.com as a place to start. And if you would like to make a donation of your own, we suggest starting with local grassroots efforts and looking for organizations that have expressed need.

Another world is possible.

Richmond Community Bail Fund (rvabailfund.org)
Rockbridge NAACP (rockbridgenaacp.com)

There’s nothing far-fetched about violent racism in the United States. The fact is so horrifically obvious, it’s disturbing to receive an email from an editor asking if I am aware of it. This was in February. I had just submitted a review of Ben Passmore’s graphic novel Sports is Hell. The email began with a request for revisions, followed by a page of bolded comments between my sentences.

February seems like a decade ago. CV-19 was more theory than tragedy, no states had issued executive-order lockdowns, and George Floyd was still alive.

So was Ahmaud Arbery.

So was Breonna Taylor.

Four months ago, it was unimaginable that the square in front of the White House could be renamed “Black Lives Matters Plaza” and the street-wide letters painted in fluorescent yellow down two blocks.

It was unimaginable that the NFL could declare: “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe black lives matter.”

That fact makes Sports is Hell startlingly prescient, since the take-a-knee controversy was the novel’s inspiration.

I’d tried to describe the tone of Passmore’s parody accurately, but there’s a gulf between cartoon reality and actual reality.

I wrote: “a man carrying a We The People sign is trying to catch a bus to a Black Lives Matter protest. Seems plausible enough, until a couple at the bus stop start talking. ​First, the white woman asks the black stranger if he wants some money, and then her boyfriend exclaims, ‘We love black people!’”

But outside of the novel’s fictional context, does that sound implausible?

I wrote: “The tone is already farcical”

Yet a summary of the novel might sound disturbingly real and not farcical at all.

I wrote: “The ambiguous merging of political protest, pointless vandalism, and football party seems about right too—but would a protest organizer really start shouting for the city to unite behind the leadership of Birds wide receiver, Collins?”

Yes, if he were viewed symbolically like Kaepernick.

I wrote: “Of course the police soon open fire on the unarmed crowd, but Passmore doesn’t plunge into full farce until the Nord Football Club for Racial Purity starts shooting too, followed by the Holy Nation of Second-String Quarterback Sherman Muck.”

Of course police have been violently dispersing crowds long before the George Floyd protests started.

I wrote: “the white characters are on the receiving end of most the humor.”

Which is appropriate. My editor suggested I read Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

I responded in an email: “Clearly I didn’t adequately describe in words the VISUAL tone that Passmore creates. The graphic novel IS unquestionably farce, though I accept that my verbal description didn’t convey that to you. I am indeed deeply aware of everything you listed (though, no, the four students who died at Kent State fifty years ago were not shot by riot police but members of the National Guard, and the scene Passmore draws is nothing even remotely like that in either tone or substance) but I appreciate your editorial concerns.”

I made the changes.

The problem was mostly miscommunication. An image tells a very different story than a sentence, and Passmore’s images are darkly cartoonish. Like any cartoon, they are simplified and exaggerated. His white characters are distorted caricatures reflecting an accurate critique of U.S. race relations. That’s the point.

But the miscommunication was mine.

I’m a white writer. I don’t get to be anything but precise when writing about race because I don’t have the right to the benefit of the doubt. My editor assumed I was suffering from garden-variety liberal racism. And that’s a fair assumption. If I want someone to not assume that, I need to demonstrate that it’s not true. I can’t expect it as a default setting. Just the opposite. If the topic is race, readers should second guess me, and I should work twice as hard knowing that.

So I’m lucky to have a good editor.

Here’s the review at is appeared a thousand years ago in February:

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” said 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after not standing for the pre-game national anthem for the first time in 2016. “To me,” continued Kaepernick, “this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

Kapernick’s fictional counterpart in Ben Passmore’s graphic novella Sports Is Hell is less eloquent. When asked by a reporter, “Do you intend to kneel during the national anthem, despite many people calling it disrespectful?” Birds wide receiver Marshall Quandary Collins simply answers, “Yes.”

Passmore’s sportscasters (who have logos for heads) call that single response “inflammatory.” Collins seems anything but.

Passmore draws oversized beads of sweat across Collins’ face. His eyes shift with every noise rising from the stadium crowd. On the field, Collins looks like a man who’s afraid he’s about to be shot. Since Kaepernick was taunted with death threats, this is one of the least farfetched things about this apocalyptic parody of racism in the US.

Passmore’s Sports Is Hell is about football in the sense that Melville’s Moby Dick is about seafood. Which means there’s plenty of football, including Collins’ Super-Bowl-winning touchdown reception. There’s also a later post-penalty reenactment performed at gunpoint in the courtyard of an all-white condo complex while militias battle in the burning streets. As one of Passmore’s anarchist characters explains: “Football teams are just a stand-in for identity.”

Despite the cover image—a weapon-toting football player standing in a field of skulls and debris—Passmore begins the novella with a few roughly realistic vignettes that imply that the story world is our world, only slightly more so. Children shoot pretend guns in the street until a bowtie-clad neighbor scolds them. But with his warning he points at a police car and says, “You don’t play with them. If you point something at them make sure it’s real.”

A page later, a man carrying a “We The People” sign is trying to catch a bus to a Black Lives Matter protest. A white woman asks the black stranger if he wants some money, and then her boyfriend exclaims, “We love black people!”

Turn the page and we’re with a different couple in a bedroom planning for the after-game celebration. Only they’re packing hammers and spray paint in hopes of a literal riot, not that “dusty nonviolence shit” of Black Lives Matter.

Though the tone is already moving toward farce, the ensuing riot begins realistically enough, with roving street crowds and a toppled can of burning trash. The ambiguous merging of political protest, pointless vandalism, and football party seems about right too—even when a protest organizer starts shouting for the city to unite behind the leadership of Birds wide receiver Collins.

Of course the police soon open fire on the unarmed crowd. The police retreat before the Nord Football Club for Racial Purity starts shooting too, followed by another team of neo-Nazis, the Holy Nation of Second-String Quarterback Sherman Muck. Did I mention the other Super Bowl team is named the Whites?

Like most cartoon commentary, Passmore’s doesn’t suffer from subtlety. Though the cast is mostly black (all those folks we met in the opening pages get thrown together like zombie survivors in a boarded-up mall) the white characters are on the receiving end of most the humor.

Passmore’s two-tone color scheme—black and an oddly appropriate beige—reduces but doesn’t obscure the increasing gore. His characters are also only mildly exaggerated, and since their universe obeys the same basic laws of physics as ours, cartoon bullets do non-cartoonish damage to their almost-proportional bodies. Yet still, most of the cast survives.

To say the novella’s ending is abrupt would be an understatement. That’s clearly Passmore’s intent. This is just another day living under US racial dystopia. Basketball season probably won’t be any different.

Meanwhile the real-world Kaepernick still isn’t playing football even though it’s been a year since he came to a confidential settlement and withdrew his lawsuit. The lawsuit accused the NFL of colluding to prevent his being hired after he became a free agent in 2017. According to the President of the United States, Colin and other players who take a knee during the anthem are at fault: “They’re ruining the game.”

With that kind of cartoon-like reality for a national backdrop, farce may have been Passmore’s most realistic option.