All I know . . .

 

So, I've gone about today's Digital Pedagogy Lab activities in my own order. I started by reading Ashley McCall's excellent keynote, reading and listening to Sean's Day 3 Welcome post/video, and attending the Zoom keynote Q&A. I actually haven't done the reading in the Microfiction Manual yet (I'll be getting to it later this afternoon 😊). 

McCall's emphasis on breaking our cyles of revolution in order to evolve in ways that challenge our reliance on "memorized counterproductive movements" in our pedagogy resonated with me. I'm thinking about ways to "listen, process, and adjust" in my (mostly online) history classrooms. 

Sean's morning comments emphasized the ability to become comfortable with expressing "I don't know." His comment that "expertise is a defensive posture" struck a chord with me, and it's something I'll be thinking about for quite some time. 

His comments dovetail with McCall's emphasis on emphasizing the importance of the learning journey rather than focusing on the knowledge we've gained, as if knowledge were a static category. 

As I was listening to the keynote Q&A, I took a look at the #digped Twitter feed to see what folks were saying about her inspiring essay and the conversation it was generating. Among the tweets, I found Jennifer Schaller's, my friend and colleague, tweet about deciding to try a shorter-than-100-word-story in the form of a creative nonfiction tweet (#cnftweet). I read her incredible story in just a few characters and my mind went to a place where everything I had been reading came together: 

Green Day's cover of Operation Ivy's "Knowledge." 

More than just a pop-punk cover of an iconic, cult punk song, "Knowledge" spoke to me as a teenager growing up in a devoutly Mormon household in a Salt Lake City suburb. I remembered sitting on the living room floor, headphones plugged into the family stereo (I didn't yet have my own), listening to my cassette tape of Green Day's "1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours" (I have that album playing in my headphones as I type this--wireless headphones streaming Apple Music on my MacBook Air--tech has come a long way!).

Unlike Jen's story, mine isn't the heart of a longer essay that I had previously written, although I do have a deep interest in creative nonfiction (I'm so glad she shared that hashtag! Here's a longer piece of creative fiction I wrote a while back, inspired by "The Memory Palace" podcast). Nor does my story revisit trauma. 

Like Jen's story, mine attempts to express a dynamic between myself and my mother, albeit a completely different type of relationship and situation. As I've already alluded to, my creative nonfiction tweet attempts to capture a memory from my teenage years. 

Here it is: 

"🎵All I know is that I don’t know, all I know is that I don’t know nothing” my 14-year-old self sang, only I heard the music blaring in my headphones. Immediately, I saw the hurt and disappointment in her eyes. “Of course you know. You’re so smart,” mom chided. #cnftweet

— Brandon Morgan (@CNMBrandon) August 4, 2021

 As a teenager, full of the typical angst and trying to figure out who I was, the song was fun and silly. I think that one of my favorite things about it at the time was its use of the f-word 😲

For my mom, I debased myself by singing those words aloud. I should have known that I was a son of god, that I had great talents and capacity. I understood her perspective to a small extent at that point in time, and resumed quietly listening to my cassette tape to avoid any further conversation. 

Since then, I've realized that the song's message is an important one and not only for angsty teens. In punk-rock style, it expresses the reality that knowledge changes, that we're placing an unfair burden on students, children, teenagers when we ask them "what do you want to be when you grow up?" (as McCall duly noted in her essay). To challenge our revolutions in the status quo, we need to listen and adjust. 

I'm still unpacking this memory of mine, but it's one that I've returned to at various times in my adult life. Today's not the first time it's floated to the top of my memory pool, but it did seem to fit with the issues and ideas we've been considering at DPL today. 

As I sat down to write this, I returned to the Green Day cover of "Knowledge" on Apple Music and the videos below of the Operation Ivy original and another live Green Day cover.