That's So Gay and Why Revisionism Should be Your Life Partner

 

That's So Gay and Why Revisionism 

Should be Your Life Partner

Derrick said that I should wear tighter shorts that would accentuate my otherwise flat-ass ass. I responded flippantly with, “That’s so gay Derrick.” After uttering the phrase, time froze – Derrick and Layla transformed into Quicksilver from X-men, their eyes darting about my sterile dorm room with a mixture of  surprise, melancholy, and acrimony while I sat there inert, dormant, immobile. You see, Derrick is gay, and of course I knew that, but somehow the phrase came out my lips, smooth  as sippin’ mornin’ coffee. Breaching the space of infinite awkward stretching out before us, Layla said, “Gill, what do you mean by that?” I spluttered. Swallowed my tongue. Didn’t have a response. Layla’s brave questioning confronted me with perspective. My meta took a moment to collect itself, but eventually it caught up and I thought: there is no one way a gay person acts. Why the hell do I even have that phrase in my vocabulary? What I said was so obviously nonsensical, offensive, incorrect.

Something magical happened within me in that moment of discomfort. I empathized with Derrick and resolved to never say that’s so gay again. In short, I made a revision. If the version of me who said that’s so gay in front of Derrick was Matt 1.0 I was now more like Matt 1.5. Still not present-day Matt, but Matt 1.5 was definitely an improvement from Matt 1.0. I learned this lesson about the power of revision while attempting to build learning communities in my work as a Resident Assistant (RA) at my university.

At the time, I was every part of my 20 years, a package that came complete with youthful arrogance, denial of my white privilege, and a congressional library chock-full of vanity. As RA, my “residents” instilled in me a newfound patience through their conspicuous attempts at red-solo-cup hiding, fire alarm tampering, penis graffiti-ing, and a blatant disregard for quiet hours. In many ways I feel like this job likely prepared me well for managing and educating a classroom full of 6th graders. Although my interactions with residents certainly added copious amounts of knowledge to my growing brain, it was frequently conversations with my RA peers, like Derrick and Layla, that pushed me to make profound revisions to who I was and who I wanted to be.

I recently became obsessed with the idea of revision as a practice, a way of life. In, “Kiese Laymon on Revision as Love, and Love as Revision,” an episode of the Thresholds podcast, Laymon boldly states:

... Revisitation is part of love. Like, we love songs. Often we go back and listen and listen and listen. And those re-listenings give us different portals of entry into us, into the song-maker, into all kind of stuff. And also, to revise in love, you have to listen to people outside of yourself. You have to listen to other visions of yourself. You have to mind other people’s visions of who you are to them.

How we as educators choose to build our classroom community can be an opportunity for our students to explore visions of themselves and how others view them. Kiese’s idea of revisitation as a path towards love is something I push my students to embrace both in and outside of the classroom. Building a classroom culture that craves revision over stagnation does not happen all at once. I make intentional choices about the mentor texts we explore, the behaviors I model for my students, and how we will write as a class.

At the beginning of the year, I showed my students the short film, Bibi, produced by Learning for Justice. In the movie, a Latinx father and his son connect through the power of letter writing after Bibi’s mom passes away. They are able to write about anything and everything in their letters, especially hard conversations. However, when Bibi hands his dad a letter that reads, “I’m gay,” he walks out of his son’s life and they never speak again. In a turnabout at the end of the film, Bibi meets his father’s caregiver, Angel, and realizes that his dad set them up – it is implied that Angel is also gay. Part of my purpose in showing the film was to demonstrate that my classroom is a space where students of all sexual orientations are welcome, but I also wanted my students to learn that people are not binary, that they can adapt and change for the better through revision of their mindset. 

Prior to, during, and after watching Bibi, students explored intersectionality, discussed visible and invisible identities, and worked in small groups to analyze the story and its main characters. Before pushing my students to write, we came back together as a whole class and I shared my that’s so gay story. In typical 6th grade fashion, they teamed up to express collective outrage that Mr. Gill acted a fool and hurt Derrick’s feelings. Now that I had them hooked, we engaged in a conversation about revision as a mindset. I talked about how revision is something ongoing – that it never ends, but is the force that propels us forward as learners. We juxtaposed my that’s so gay microagression alongside the conflict between Bibi and his father, and discussed how those situations led to revisions in mindset. Students then wrote an open letter to a character of choice from Bibi describing how their story revised their mindsets around identity, intersectionality, and forgiveness.

After propping up revisionism as a mindset to aspire to, I could push students towards revision in other academic settings without being thwarted by a bastion of 6th graders playing the part of the Star Wars rebel alliance. In my classroom, we spend a good chunk of time investigating graphic novels both as readers and as writers with the end goal being that each student will write their own graphic novel. Our class mentor text graphic novel this year was Displacement, by Kiku Hughes. In the book, Kiku is displaced from her Seattle home in present-day back into the past Japanese Incarceration camps her grandmother Ernestina lived through.

While reading the book, we investigated how the United States revised history to make the camps seem less cruel, thereby downplaying the severity of the situation. Specifically, we studied euphemisms and how they are often used to avoid hard truths, whether as an individual or as a collective. By the time we finished reading the book, students suggested that rather than avoid the truth, we should look at it honestly in order to revise our community and ensure a better future.

During the graphic novel study, students explored different comic techniques through an inquiry approach in order to expand their writer’s toolkit for their own graphic novels. For example, we examined how a graphic novel artist might use camera angle to show the progression of time, or the movement of a character. While working on their storyboards, I led students in an activity where they individually perused a graphic novel of their choice for 20 minutes, in search of a new comic technique that we had not discussed as a whole class. They were tasked with coming up with a name, description, and illustration of their technique on a big post-it note. After sharing their creative genius  in a chalk talk protocol, I pushed students to try out at least one of these techniques as a revision to their own graphic novels. I told them they were not required to keep it, but that they needed to at least try it on. 

In the Writer’s Mindset, Chris Hall posits that in order for it to succeed, revision is a process that should occur throughout the writing process, not just at a finite point like the end. With this type of thinking in mind, I provided students with various opportunities to revise their graphic novels on an ongoing basis, from writer workshops with their peers, to 1:1 meetings with me and other educators in the room, to pair conferences. The end result was fantastic final products from my students. They loved the opportunity to work on this project for an extended period of time with ample time to revisit and revise.

In The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Daniel Pink describes 3 benefits we experience through regret: it can improve our decisions, boost our performance, and deepen meaning. In many ways revision is intermingled with regret. It is in our ability to travel back in time and think about what we did versus what could be that revisionism is born. As educators, our success is deeply rooted in our ability to revise and reimagine our classrooms. To Kiese’s point, maybe we listened to the same song a thousand times, but on the thousandth time through, we are still able to discover new meaning in an obscure note or neglected lyric. However, revision for ourselves alone is not enough.

We owe it to our students to provide them with the agency to explore revision as a mindset so that they can grow into responsible social justice warriors who will get into John Lewis’ good trouble and enact positive change in their communities. It would be irresponsible and erroneous for me to suggest that by the end of the year my students were revision experts – but that’s fine by me. Revision is messy. Whether it be revision as a mindset, revision as a writer, or revision as a way of life. What I can say with absolute certainty is that my students learned how to be messy this year, how to sit in discomfort, and how to confront their past decisions head on with an aim of improvement. They are both already revising and ready to revise for the rest of their life. What skill could be more vital at this chaotic moment than a swiftness in the arena of CTRL + Z?