Keeping Politics Out of the Classroom

My students have not expressed surprise at the absence of politics in my online class. Although I did encourage them to vote, I did not tell them who they should vote for and why. My emphasis in the class is on their writing and the individual assignments.

I emphasized in the syllabus that I seek to create a harmonious learning environment. Any student who cannot accept the experiences of his/her peers will be asked to leave the class. As the instructor, I seek to create a harmonious environment by not sharing my own political views. 

Having adopted a textbook that emphasizes academic writing, I have revised my assignments and eliminated the personal essay in my first-semester writing class. There are fewer opportunities for the students to share their personal experience, except when their experience lends support to the literacy narrative, the information essay, the evaluation essay, and the position essay, which is limited to such things as food dyes, sugar, plant-based diet, plastics, microfibers, cosmetics, sleep deprivation and academic performance, and student loan debt.

My awareness of current events is somewhat limited to the topics my students research for their position essay. I feel extremely fortunate at not having cable TV, which means that I cannot access the news on the major networks. While it may seem as though I distance myself from politics or news stories in general, I actually go to the BBC News website (one of the few forums for objective news) every morning and get updates on developing news stories on Twitter during the day. I have a subscription to the New York Times through my college but don’t access it on a regular basis.

Twitter, for me, is more a source of information than a social medium. Many of the people I follow are authors whose nonfiction I have read. I also follow those people whose concerns match what my students research for the position essay.

During the recent election, I used a separate browser, one without an adblocker, to check on the voting statistics--that is, the number of states that had voted for Biden. It was my wife, however, who told me one morning that Biden had gotten enough electoral votes to become president by winning Pennsylvania.

I hope that the next couple of months go by smoothly and that we will start to see change in this country on January 20. If my classes for the spring semester fill, I still will not be expressing my enthusiasm for Biden’s presidency in my classes. My emphasis, as always, will be on the subject matter.