Trying out class ideas on my kids: Jonestown.

One of my students, the graphic arts girl who dresses well and is very conscientious with her work, was asking me before the BDSM class if I was going to be teaching again the next year.

“Not next year because I need to finish my dissertation,” I was like, “But the year after I’m hoping to try to teach four to five classes, I’ve already started to explore that.”

I then said that I was looking at maybe doing the entering freshman writing seminar, and was thinking that a great topic for the semester would be Jonestown, where for the entire class you try to understand it, and you look at its contexts, the history of movements like Pentecostalism that fed into it, scholarship on new religious movements, everything.

“For the first day,” I was like, “I would love to show news footage of the bodies, and then read off the names of all the people who died.”

Then, I added, “That was like nine hundred and twenty people.  I think it would take an hour-and-a-half.”

Then, I asked, “What do you think would happen if I did that?   We’d just all be in a circle, me and these freshmen, all with a list of names, and we go around in a circle and read names for like an hour-and-half.”

One of my students who was there was like, “Well, you’d get a lot of drops that first week.”

“I’d take it,” my one graphic arts girl said, quickly and seriously.

“I would too,” the student who said they’re’d be a lot of drops.

I then added that when I had met People Temples survivors, the one thing they said that they wanted taught if Jonestown was taught was that people weren’t mindless cultists, but were the most heterogenous group of people you’ve ever met, each and every one unique and such an individual.

“That’s what you have to understand,” I was like.  “Nine hundred and twenty is a number.  How do you break that down, how do you wrap your head around the magnitude?”.

I also said that Peoples Temple survivors have a newsletter, and one of the things they do regularly is evaluate artistic references to Jonestown, so the final class or 2 would be to look at how artists have used it and what Peoples Temple survivors thought.

At that, my one graphic arts girl said that in one of the Armistad Maupin Tales of the City books, one of the people in the building turns out to be a woman who fled from Jonestown through the jungle with her baby.

“That was the woman I met!”, I was like.