On being a heterodox educator
An interview with a public high school psychology teacher
Joe Metzka is a high school teacher in a suburb of St. Louis. He was raised by a mechanic and an immigrant from Korea, and he was a first-generation college athlete. Joe dons a ponytail, plays in a band, and describes his clothing as “loud.” He has a Ph.D. in psychology and teaches the subject at a local public high school and university. He really enjoys these “gigs.” He has gained some wisdom through his life experiences and years of teaching and openly shares his knowledge with his students. Being open about his journey helps his students navigate their path through life. He describes this approach to teaching as altruism:
I try not to be threatening, you know, to embrace my vulnerabilities openly with them.
To illustrate this point he provides an example of helping his students navigate difficult texts: He says to them
“Okay, this is a bunch of fancy talk. And all these people you read, they have to show you how smart they are by using the word provocation, whatever.” So, I say, “here’s what it means,” and just talk through it with them to help them to embrace that, working through the uncertainty of something.
The community where Joe teaches is diverse, which provides opportunities for dialogue across differences:
It’s a nice little community we live in. There’s class diversity. There’s racial diversity, and political diversity here. I tell them, genuinely, “this is what I hope the world can be like.” Where that kid from the trailer park is talking to the military officer’s kid over here. The three basketball players whose families are in East St. Louis, the first generation to move in the next town over from East St. Louis, they’re talking to the preppy girl who leaves with a Jaguar. It’s a chance for these people to be exposed to differences. It’s really neat.
Joe is a self-described classical liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense of the term. Or at least that’s what he thinks he is:
In the current climate, who knows.
Through his teaching, Joe encourages his students to be heterodox thinkers. He feels like he is in a “sweet spot” in his career where he can tackle more controversial issues with his students.
Joe and I got on Zoom to talk about the value of being a heterodox thinker and how he works with high school students to encourage this type of thinking in themselves. Here are more excerpts from our conversation*.
What is education to you, and what does it mean to be an educated person?
You know, making it about [the students]. Okay, “here’s where you are. And let me see if I can poke at this a little bit and provoke this to try and get you to expand where you are going, to embrace that kind of conflict.” It’s like, I’m exposing myself to an idea I don’t like. And that’s the only way I can learn. That if you just insulate yourself in an echo chamber, you’re actively regressing. We see some of that in our culture. It’s unfortunate. So trying to get them to do that.
That’s my mission right now in education: think for yourself. Was it Richard Feynman who said, a scientist is somebody who does not trust experts. You know, to be productively skeptical. If I give you a piece of information, don’t just believe it. Deconstruct it, look at it from multiple perspectives. Like we say, we use the word heterodox. So that’s what I feel like my job is. Being educated is to be able to look at, to actively seek my blind spots. We all have them inevitably. Where are they? Let me embrace that discomfort of exposing them. There’s an ongoing effort required to being educated.
Is that one way you introduce John Stuart Mill? His argument that “He who knows only his side of the case knows very little of that.”
Yeah, so the first argument is that the other opinion may be true. The second one is he who only knows his side of the case knows little of that. And then the third one conflicting doctrines may share the truth. One and three, those get little pushback. Students will say, “oh, yeah, well, that might be true. Yes, that makes sense.” And “oh, yeah, the truth might be between us. That’s cool.” But the idea of actively seeking out the other side, that’s where I feel like I do the lion's share my work. And this is the business of learning to embrace conflict, which is unnatural. It’s something you have to cultivate.
[I instruct students to] write a discussion board post in our online [platform] about what your belief about this construct is and then come back and look, after we take the chance to engage an opposing view. And if you look back and say, “why did [I] say that? That’s so simple and primitive?” You can use that as an illustration to say that actively engaging somebody helps you to expose things and push you into new growth. Growth is painful. It’s like going to the gym. You got to throw some more weight on there if you want to get stronger. Same thing. You have to expose yourself to new things, progressive resistance intellectually and socially to learn these things.
Do you ever get interference from parents about the ways that you’re discussing the more controversial issues?
Honestly, not so much. It’s a real blessing. I don’t get the pushback, which means either I’m not going far enough or I’m doing it really well. Because, you know, the idea of: if you're really a heterodox thinker, then you're kind of like upsetting people on both sides. So, there's a little [pushback], but it mostly comes from the students themselves, where they’ll get triggered by something and then challenge me with an email later. And that’s harrowing. But it’s been fun to resolve those things and have the chance to demonstrate good faith with them that I do care about them. It’s not my time, it’s their time.
I think I get sort of a pass because I’m biracial. My mom’s Korean. Students embrace that. And we talk about it. I can enter the race conversation by saying, “oh, yeah, I used to fight at the bus stop.” And “you ever seen an angry Korean woman swear at you in Korean?” I get a pass to say things that. My best buddy’s a white guy from Southern Illinois who was raised Catholic and is ethnic German. And he’s like, “I can’t say that in class!” It gives me a pass. Biracial, half black kids frequently tell me, “I can relate to you because you’re half like me.” And so we open up the conversation about straddling cultures, you know, have the courage to leap into it.
[And] I’m getting older now. When I was younger, I used to sidestep some of those landmines. And that’s not so much a problem anymore. I’m their parents’ age. So, I think I’m in a sweet spot thriving doing this stuff. And every time I do it, [I’m] reflecting and trying to do things better.
When you get pushback from students—you mentioned receiving emails from students—what is it usually about?
Lately, the progressive [students] are the ones that are becoming more brazen. The pickup artists, they call it the “shit test.” If a girl is actually interested, she’s going to test you to see if you can stand up, and the students do that. The progressive students do that, the conservatives not so much. I found that they continue to opt out because they don’t want to get flamed in class. So they’ll just opt out of having these discussions and I have to coax them: “here’s what you can do, what you need to do, to be good community members and to be cool in the classroom.” They’re reluctant to do that. They’ll open up to me privately. It’s like, “yeah, my family will vote for Donald Trump, but because of economics, we don’t like him.” You can say that in class, [but] they’re very reluctant in this kind of climate.
Joe also described two instances when students sent him emails after having a conversation in class that upset them. Both had to do with sexual identity, which, it turned out, the students were grappling with themselves. He referenced Carl Jung to describe that the issues students have with classroom topics are typically related to their personal journeys:
Was it Carl Jung who said that which irritates us about others is a window into understanding ourselves.
I probed this topic: When you get push-back, it seems like a strongly held belief or an experience they’re having in their life that is triggering their response.
Carl Jung's Aion, which is chapter nine from the Collective Unconscious, right? I have them read that, it’s inspired by Jordan Peterson’s work, and really looks at: Okay, when I get resentful, that emotion of resentment is really useful because it can show me my blind spots, it can show me my anxieties. I can look at those and make them conscious, and it does mitigate anxiety, you know. Because that’s another buzzword—anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, depression, anxiety, they all talk about this. I’m like, “here’s the way you push back into that when you get pissed. If I say something, and you get mad at me, give yourself time and then look at it. And try and really look at it. It’s scary.” But I do think you’re right, I think it becomes these kinds of personal, either values or unconscious conflicts.
To me, it seems like the common humanity approach is the only way to have these conversations.
I hope so. Young folks, they talk about blocking each other. And how Twitter is like a fun-house mirror of reality. It’s like, we got this generation of people used to blocking things that [they] disagree with, so you work through that. It’s like, “okay, look, you don’t get to block that student, you have to sit by them all semester. You play basketball with that kid.”
What does blocking look like in the classroom? Just walking away, or saying I don’t want to hear this?
Usually, it devolves into a name call. All the “racist,” “homophobic,” “sexist,” “fascist”... Those are name calls to me. People can disagree, that’s fine. [Students] say, “well, it's not a name call when I say fascist because I know what it means.” To me, that’s a name and I won’t tolerate it. [I'll say], “you called that kid racist, define it.” It’s difficult. When it devolves into a name call, it’s like calling somebody a moron. I’m like, “oh no, do better. And what do you mean by that?” So, to me, that's where the block happens, around those name calls.
[John Stuart] Mill called it an inherited argument. Where you’re just using somebody else’s construction and passing it forward.
When Joe’s students repeat an opinion they’ve heard on social media or from friends (i.e., the inherited argument), he instructs them to come to their own conclusions:
[Don't] just copy/paste somebody else’s argument. That’s not thinking, that’s not being educated. Build your own production, reference it, cite it, and say, this is what this research says, this is what I read from this periodical, this is what I saw on the news. And make your own productions of that.
Sometimes students [are] scared to even talk. So, I try hard to create a climate, I’ll make jokes at my own expense. I make jokes about my mother, the guys in my band blowing me up. I open up to those things and show them that I’m human and flawed.
*Edits have been made to improve the flow of the conversation.
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