Theme: Striving to remain open to others and to the future, to what these can teach, even within the complexities of institutional and social dynamics.
Though I work hard to meet each student as a unique learner, because it’s what I believe in ethically, I’m of course guilty of allowing stereotypes and fast assumptions to creep into my mind even more rapidly than I can push them back out again. And then there’s Ms. G.

I love teaching at Stan State, in part because I get to know students as whole people much more easily than I would at other schools, and in part because the students here are often Latina folks with a sharp, critical perspective about the intersections of gender, ethnicity and culture that they understand not only from research but from living day to day. I teach about these topics and feel lucky to work with students who are so often committed to transforming our society for the better, through communication and advocacy. But I know from experience that young people, still navigating the early years of their adult lives, engage justice–oriented discourse in uneven fits and starts, perhaps even more than I do, and rage on through their jobs, their friendships, their fun times without the vigilant eye for injustice that my academic friends seem to breathe like oxygen. And then there’s Ms. G.

I also meet some students who love to chat me up about baseball and similar topics that, it often feels, allow these students to reassure themselves that despite our class analyses, I, too, am safely invested in patriarchy, in meritocracy, in whiteness—which of course I am, to my chagrin and despite my striving. Yet the “chat Nainby up about baseball” crowd also feels, always, like a crowd whose perspectives I want to complicate and don’t know how—the students with whom I connect over baseball fandom, a competitive corporate capitalist hegemonic masculine minefield if ever there was one, not to mention a minefield still steeped in far too much racism as well, these students always feel like a group that’s utterly distinct from the passionate advocates for transformation. As I write it, it appears a rather broad generalization, but in my experience it’s pretty much always been true, perhaps merely because of the particular communication channels these “baseball connection” students choose to open up in relationship with me. They don’t hail me the way the socially aware students do. And then there’s Ms. G.

I know a lot about baseball from the spectator/passionate fan standpoint—I mean, a LOT. I’ve been a dedicated reader of history, analysis and contemporary baseball media for more than a third of a century, so I damn well ought to know a lot. Sure, I think it’s great fun to connect with students about baseball—maybe this seems like an outright contradiction to the previous paragraph, but I prefer to think of it as a complication. But as fun as it is, it’s pretty much a disappointment, either a great or a small one, in each case—because I just know too much, too deeply, and I’m too old and too invested in a view of the game shaped by years of statistical analysis and skepticism of journalism that’s sycophantic hagiography of jocks or, even worse, surly grandstanding by TMZ–style macho twits like Bill Simmons who try to create controversy where there is none. On the rare occasion when a student knows baseball from a deep, well–read, rationally skeptical standpoint, it’ll just be centered on one team, nearly always the Giants or A’s, and only on the contemporary team—there’s too little sense of history or game–wide perspective, and I’ll be disappointed again. High standards, I know. And then there’s Ms. G.

I try to be open to each student, even those who never take a course I teach but who look to me for other forms of support. Such relationships, the odd ones that aren’t anchored in the classroom, are hard to grasp for me, even when I’m proud of finding ways to support such students (word of mouth; letters that augment other letters from classroom instructors; etc.); these relationships feel slippery, like a family connection through marriage, tenuous even as they deepen over time. This post, inspired by a gesture as simple as a graduation invitation, is my effort to be more concrete within one such relationship, distinct in so many ways, a relationship with a fearless woman of color who is unflinchingly honest about injustice and systems of oppression and who knows the game I love as much as anyone I’ve ever known in a way that’s a bit different from how I know it but not at all in a “disappointing” way, not in any shred of a lesser way. For a white man like me who teaches Stan State students about critical cultural communication topics, it’s almost impossible to overstate how much that means to me as a lifelong baseball lover—I have to look myself in the mirror and accept that despite my politics, I hadn’t been convinced that it was possible for me to meet such a woman and recognize these qualities. And for that, my deepest gratitude, Ms. G.