blog alice - teaching

persephone, thomas hart benton, 1938

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:45:00 -0500

as i am compiling images to introduce my students to the mythological background they'll need to read the odyssey, i stumbled across this interp of the rape of persephone and was absolutely wowed (check out how the landscape curves, microfying the world, as if it's been caught in a ball of mirror):

i think i know that guy.

PHEW!!

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:46:12 -0500

i've just been offered a section of engl 230 great narrative works for the spring sem at purdue, and i am ecstatic. i'm just wrapping up teaching engl 250 great american books, and although the students showed MUCH healthy resistance along the way (from day one, they demanded orwell, despite my repeated explanations that orwell never took the handy-dandy citizenship test), their projects showed that they consumed the books and processed them enough to invoke some beautiful satires. if i had a clue as to how creative they could be, i would have molded another project around it. my very, very bad.

and now as i move to editing my prospectus (thanks prof. hughes for being so patient with me), hopefully, i'll be able to experiment further with pushing the students into new (and for some uncomfortable) realms of thinking about lit. YAY! now, time to order books and pray they'll be here in four weeks.

zee books (i think) in said order (i think):

(hunks o') The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell.
The Odyssey. Homer.
Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy.
(chunks o') The Aeneid. Virgil. (needed to understand what can be understood of Dante, imho)
Inferno. (Dante)
Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry. ($#^&*$&# I can't WAIT to teach this)
Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad.
Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte.
Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys.

my students and borat: an experiment in the making

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 23:34:37 -0500

so, last night i took my freshman english students to see borat, preparing them beforehand (repeatedly) for the subversive measures the character uses to capture americans' biases (on film, no less). still, by the time they left the film, they had forgotten that 'borat' is a character portrayal and that the portrayer is indeed jewish. one student left during the gratuitous 'wrestling' scene (poor d.h. lawrence is flipping in his grave. as is oliver reed), which i attempted to prepare them for. other students were deeply offended by the speaking-in-tongues-side-of-christianity-mocking. it is interesting how certain things are o.k. to laugh at, while others aren't. religion becomes an absolute which occludes other lacking freedoms (the right to marriage, the right to identity). i tried to address this during a conference session, the occlusion of rights at the empowerment of others, but i'm not a philosophy instructor, and i don't pretend to be a counselor. and if i offered my reasoning, i would merely be forcing my own objectives onto the student. i am too green to know how to walk that line. yet.

what they have to say: http://www.blogalice.com/engl106fall2006/borat

great american...what?

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:26:10 -0400

well, i've been offered a position teaching purdue's engl 250 great american books....which puts me in a conundrum, as most of my career has been devoted to questioning what 'is' american. i think i'm going to broach this on the first day of class. rock their canonical world a little bit. give the token question: if you had to pick ten works to study in a class entitled 'great american books,' what would they be? the white male classical texts (hawthorne, melville, dreiser, etc.) would plaster the board. then...i make them see that. i have my reading list set up. if anyone has any advice, i'd love to hear it. i tried to get a mix; i've been criticized for only teaching feminist texts, so i tried to vary that up a little bit. a little anti-war here, a little miscegenation there.

i have a feeling i'm going to get blasted for using primarily contemporary works, but, as my cohorts tell me, i should be shaking the canon. but then the anticanon has become canon, no?

http://engl250fall2006.blogalice.com (a work in progress--dot--dot--dot--in my best aimee mann impression)

a pick-me-up from one of my students

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:40:30 -0400

well, i was pretty bummed last semester after teaching my two sections of ENGL 108 Accelerated First-Year Composition; several students from one of the sections indicated on my yes-no-maybe-so evaluations that i was 'insensitive' to different groups of individuals. i was bummed enough (yes, i was) to take a semester off of teaching and relegate myself to the writing lab. anywho, one of the students from that section posted to our still-floating class blog today, and made me laugh: http://alice.youaremighty.com/

thanks, nick. you made my day.

race and gaming

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:56:04 -0500

dr.b. gave a very interesting presentation today regarding race and gaming, resulting in a conversation in which my students were deeply involved. questions arose regarding race in video games--from sports to um...this...

ken mentioned "custer's revenge" to me awhile ago, and i was very hesitant to believe that this game, in which a pixelated figure dodges arrows in order to rape a rather non-proportional sioux tied to a pole, exists. alas, it's true. and i am ... (jawdroppedwide).

new hobby of late

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 12:04:31 -0400

my new hobby of late has been managing a dual class blog for the two accelerated composition courses i'm teaching at purdue. it's funny: http://joe.english.purdue.edu/fa05/damore2/

hewlett packard advocates inattention in the classroom

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:40:40 -0400

just saw an absolutely horrific commercial from hp, regarding a new line of movie-playing laptops. three students in a lecture hall each have hp laptops, and while a chemistry professor is lecturing, they are watching punk rock videos and action flicks. i have ENOUGH trouble trying to keep students' attention in the computer classroom...keeping the instant messenger off their monitors is the biggest challenge i've faced yet - they even instant message each other across the classroom.

other people bitching about the same damn thing:

bly blog

update: perhaps hp is just desperate. news is there have been a series of job cuts....

Drupal in the Classroom

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:34:36 -0400

Drupal in the English Classroom

all-in-one classroom outside of the classroom
syllabus
student forum
open communication
spotlight on the writer
accomplishment
visual rhetoric hub
film analysis
advertisement analysis
self-representation
dangers
hemorrhoids or math?
sample student

cyberdash on knowledge distribution

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:21:16 -0400

Charlie on cyberdash wrote a very interesting entry on how we should emphasize the distribution of knowledge rather than merely the distribution of technology, which is a great point. He also links to a Santa Clara University symposium that convened to address the issue and discuss creating a "digital commons" to alleviate "social and economic problems in poor countries":

Some said it was time to rethink intellectual property laws that often prevent poor countries from tapping into useful innovations and technology. ``We should recognize that intellectual property rights are competing with basic human rights,'' said Raoul Weiler, head of a European think tank.

I'd be curious to know what ya'all think of this.

4/12/05 - what does it feel like to be yellow? it sucks

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:51:52 -0400

Well I've been absent helping my students put together their project over the past two days. Yesterday's Showcase of First-Year English student projects was a very cool event. Along with my three entries, there were some incredible, emotionally-wrought projects in which students bared their insides. One project in particular caught my attention, entitled "Yellow." The student's posterboard asked the audience, "What does it feel like to be Yellow?" And the voice answers, "It sucks." The asian student filmed a video with juxtaposing images of him walking down a dark hall in a yellow tshirt, head bent; a yellow floor tile; of the back of his head as he is sitting at his desk with a yellow "go greek" tshirt on; of a yellow dust mop; of him rolling on the ground as one of his friends pretends to kick him in the side; of a yellow floor mop, a fire hydrant. I cannot express my feelings about this. I know that when I first looked at the project and heard the blaring music, I didn't make any association with racism. I thought, "Who the hell let his/her student make a project on Coldplay?" After milling with my students for another hour, I wandered over, and started to read. I was immediately chilled. One of my officemates walked over, and I asked her if she'd seen this, and she said, "It's my student's." I expressed immediate praise. But she went on to tell me that he hadn't passed the first semester due to absences. That he missed days in the beginning of the semester. And that after submitting the project, he had another series of absences. That when she was finally able to confront him, he told her that he was too ashamed to face her after submitting the project (even though she had graded him the highest in the class). That he thought the project was "not good enough." Whether this was an excuse or can be chalked up to the asian stereotype of superior excellence or "hari kari," I can't begin to label, to assume. But regardless. With a project as intuitive, as reflective, as painful as such, I would not have forced the student from the class. She told him that with his absences, the best he could get would be a "D," but his other option was to withdraw. My officemate was strong in upholding her attendance policy--as we learn in our pedagogical classes, what goes for one student, goes for all others--but I've never worked that way. Particularization for me. The bleeding-heart postcolonialist.

one of my students reading claude mckay's "america"

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:12:13 -0500

Because of the sudden wave of semi-warmth pervading West Lafayette, Indiana, I decided to have class outside last Thursday, since we were going to be discussing some poetry anyway (terribly Robin Williams' cliche', I know. so sue me). Here's the link to his recitation. He'd never seen the poem before, and was reading firsthand, but the recitation is roughly lovely. Click the image (I suck at screenshots, and wmv makes it VERY VERY hard to DO a SCREENSHOT) to view Brandon's recitation (and thanks much to Brandon for agreeing to film and show this and thanks to Chris Springstun, another dedicated student, for putting it together):

teaching philosophy

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:39:57 -0400

Ken Bain suggests that the difference between a "good" and a "great" teacher resides in the instructor's ability to generate a classroom environment which prods the students to question "larger issues" and "broader concerns", whereby the classroom creates spaces of mutual exchange and "builds a sense of community."¹ During my time at Purdue, I have molded my teaching philosophy around two platforms for learning: the classroom and the classroom outside of the classroom. In the classroom I encourage the students to engage in a communal discourse regarding political and educational as well as belief-system-oriented assumptions. Through this discourse, the students should question their assumptions and actively participate in gaining self-awareness as well as a communal identity through a diversely populated and talking classroom. Texts chosen for discussion are geared toward supporting this discussion and student-centered active learning. For example, the literary texts chosen for discussion are often anti-canonical, and students are asked to compare these texts with the canonical texts read during their secondary educational careers. In this sense the stuents are not only participating in "uncovering dialectical relationships between texts and subtexts,"²but questioning their own initial interpretations of texts.

The challenge then for myself is to ensure that these questions and discussions are not relegated to the fifty-minute classroom and then forgotten. The integration of the Drupal blog/webpage has allowed the students to carry the discussion back to their dormitories, other campus computer labs, and even home. Oliver Wrede claims that weblogs shape authorship and will require that author "to be »connected« to processes, discourses and communities."³Wrede's play on the word "connected" denotes not only a connection between the students in the classroom, but connotes a digitial connection to the community outside of our classroom community. Other institutional instructiors, including the a professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and high school instructor in Flemington, New Jersey, have become voyeurs of the Spring 2005 class's blog and have directed their students to observe the discourse our class is building on the blog. Returning to my primary goal, if students are able to transport their classroom discussion into a broader community of readers, they will prepare themselves for their induction into an increasingly global workforce in which they will need to communicate personally as well as digitally; through my structuring of the classroom environment, I hope to guide students in developing the tools that will advance them and enable them to make a difference.

3/15/05 - duck...Duck...DUCK....RAPE

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:26:10 -0500

A visually rhetorical moment if I've ever had one. Here is one of the first slides of one of my best student's group presentation on date rape and date rape drugs. This image was discussed amongst my peers, in my teaching mentor group, in the classroom with the student's peers. This is the third version. He is practicing honing his "rhetorical savvy", and I am trying to guide him through this moment...and he is learning. He is defending his project, creating support for his argument, and taking the criticism like a trooper. I am still in a quandary, though. Offensive or inoffensive? Successfully detailed to his argument or not? What about the ducks--effeminate, identical, childlike? I've become so paranoid over potentially offensive material on my blog that I feel lodged into a well of silence--unable to say no to the student because that would be a grave disservice, a silencing of him, and unable to say yes because I am so damned paranoid. Of what? Of offending another? Of not getting a job when I break out? How do I incorporate a moment such as this into my teaching philosophy? A moment of paralysis? Of being frightened? Of censoring?

3/11/05 - snapshot

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:28:00 -0500

Students displaying their own productions of visual rhetoric and manipulating the items that render self-expression.