Each semester, I inevitably share my musical tastes with students. This may arise when I play background music while students do some in class writing, or it may arise when we discuss a specific topic and that topic reminds me a song. This semester, I shared with students some of my musical tastes, specifically my love for punk, hardcore, and metal. Their initial reaction, of course, was bewilderment because, as they said, “I did not picture you listening to that type of music.” That comment didn’t shock me because, as I tell them again and again, we know each other in a certain setting, the classroom. I am their teacher and they are students. It’s like seeing their elementary school teacher at the grocery store. The location doesn’t match, and the image they have of me doesn’t match because they only know me within one context.

One student asked me another question. As I went through various artists, the majority of which they had never heard of, the student asked, “How do you find these artists?” The student didn’t realize it at the time, but her question encapsulates so much about learning and education. I told the student that I researched. I sought out bands and musicians. When I came across one artist, I may move backwards from that artist, seeing who or what influenced them. I told them about hearing Nirvana for the first time and then digging deeper into other bands on Sub Pop and the grunge scene from Mudhoney, The Melvins, and Soundgarden, to looking at Nirvana’s roots from The Wipers, Leadbelly, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, and more. Nirvana served as the entry point, not the finish line.

I do the same with books. When I start to think about the syllabus for an upcoming course, I begin, most of the time, either with a main, overarching theme or concept. I already have some texts in mind at the beginning, but I also know that I want to add more texts to the course, texts that I have never read before. For example, when I started to construct my Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité course, I knew I wanted to focus on the intersections between African American expatriates writers in France and France’s treatment of individuals it colonized, such as Algerians, Senegalese, and more. My starting point was African American writers such as John A. Williams, Claude McKay, and James Baldwin. Even though I knew I wanted to teach these writers, I also started to research other texts, which led me to William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face, a novel focused on an African American expatriate in France during the 1960s and his friendship with Algerian independence fighters.

After deciding which African American writers to teach, I started to delve into French writers. This research led me to discover Leïla Silmani’s In the Country of Others, which focuses on a French-Moroccan family during the Moroccan War of Independence, and to Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, a novel focused on an Iranian family fleeing Iran for France. I also discovered other novels, which I did not use in the course and which remain on my to be read list. These include Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, Simone Schwarz-Bar’s The Bridge Beyond, and Mariama Bâ’s Scarlet Song. I research books I have never read and add them to my courses because I want to expand my knowledge and understanding of the world. In the Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité course, I had not, before constructing the syllabus, read any of the novels I assigned. For most courses, I have not read about one third to half of the texts I assign in the classes.

Why do I do this? Why don’t I teach the same texts each semester? Why do I add more work for myself when preparing for a course? These questions remind me of the student’s question about how I discover music. I do this because, as I mentioned before, I want to learn more. I do not want to remain stagnant and allow myself to soldify and calcify. I want to become challenged in my beliefs, in my thoughts, and in my worldview. I want to learn about others and see others. Along with this, I want to experience these texts alongside my students, for the first time. I want all of us to engage in a collective engagement with the work. I want us to each come to the text fresh, without any influence or preconceived notions of what it has to offer. I want to, essentially, model for students what it means to be a lifelong learner, a lifelong questioner, a lifelong explorer who engages with the world them.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what books I have been reading so far in 2025, and Ashok Masillamani responded to my post with The Stories We are Allowed to Read vs. The Ones We Must Find. In the response, Masillamani points out that “Reading is a luxury. It is also a responsibility.” Reading is, as Masillamanii continues, “political.” I completely agree with everything Masillamaii points out about my post. My discussion of what I have read so far this year includes essentially Western texts, notably Nobel laurates. It does not include voices outside of “acceptable” literary canons. It priviliges some voices and perspectives while ignoring others. I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment of my post, and I encourage everyone to research, to discover texts and voices that they may never encounter on the shelves in a bookstore. When reading a book like Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, add Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Returning to Haifa and other works to your to be read pile. When wanting to learn more about France, don’t just read authors who glorify of uplift French perspectives, read individuals like Silmani or Djavadi or René Maran’s Batouala which point out the ways that Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité have not always applied to all.

Masillamanii continues by pointing out that we should not read literature to make ourselves feel comfortable, writing, “Literature should not be a tour of empathy. It should be a crucible of confrontation.” I would argue against the first part of this sentiment some, because I always think about James Baldwin who said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” Baldwin points out the ways that literature connects us, invoking empathy. However, I understand where Masillamanii comes from here, and I completely agree with the second part, that literature “should be a crucible of confrontation.” It should challenge, and we should accept that challenge and engage it. Without that confrontation, we would not grow. We would not learn. We would not expand.

Literature, ultimately, is a political weapon, a tool to confront those who seek to oppress and to provide voice for the oppressed. We know this. We see this. Ta-Nehisi Coates told his students that as writers their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.” That means confrontation. That means shedding light on injustices. That means letting their voices ring out. As readers, our choices in who and what we read are also political, as our choices in the music we listen to, the films we watch, the media we consume, and more. We make choices, and those choices tell others how we view the world. These choices continue throughout our lives, until we die, and we must, with each choice, think about what it will teach us about the world. As Lillian Smith wrote to an English teacher when he asked her to tell his students what it takes to be a good writer, “I don’t know when learning stops. But I know a writer never stops learning, not ever — until she is dead as a creative being. When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die: time to crawl into that small room and put the cover over you.”

What are your thoughts? How do you choose what to read or what media to consume? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.