January 2008

I am teaching English classes at CC2. I started with readings about art because they seemed to be the least… inflammatory. Turns out many of my students are artists: sculptors, painters, photographers, musicians, dancers… I was surprised by the number of artists in my classes.

One of my classes is in the art building. It is newer than one of my other buildings and older than the other. But the thing that amazes me is the way art is functional in the space.

The floor near the gallery is a huge circular mosaic. The gallery is really an alcove, about the size of a room, with art around.

There are metal outlines of people, a bit Art Deco, to mark the bathrooms. You can see that the bathrooms are there without having to go hunting down the hall for a marked door. Genius! Art and function melded together like… some group I was just talking to someone about. Ah, the Japanese. Art and function put together to create beauty. Amazing.

There is also a metal coffee cup, complete with steam, jutting out over the door of the break room, which contains two tables, chairs, a Coke machine, and a junk food machine.

In the hall that my classroom is in there is a large metal heavy rusty thing about fourteen inches long and eight wide and two high. It is far too heavy to move and I have asked if it is art, but no one I asked seemed to know. If it is art, it matches the packages of Crayolas glued to a black folding wallet and displayed in the art gallery alcove. (In other words, I don’t think it is art.)

I love being in that building.

The older building offers such hope, streamlined walls, wide stairs, brick, Mexican tile roof. But inside it looks like an old and tired high school.

The newer building is too minimalist for my tastes. There are doors I am not sure actually go anywhere inside and there are doors that don’t appear to actually go outside. It is very open and airy, looking down two floors into a huge hole that houses lots of computers. It is not a pretty building.

1. Get your students to read the text before class without overloading yourself with grading. Make questions on the text to be turned in before the discussion. Randomize your electronic grade book each time and grade the top five. Call on the top five in class to give their responses.

2. Get your students to think more deeply. In class help your students analyze a familiar story, such as a fairy tale, using Bloom’s Taxonomy. Use a Bloom checklist as part of a rubric for grading written work.

3. Get your students to attend classes regularly and on time. Make a point system that has serious consequences for failure to attend and for being late to class as part of your syllabus and refer to it in class.

4. Make it safe to be creative in your class. Attack perfectionism head on!! Make at least one assignment where you ask students to make the worst mistakes they possibly can on purpose. Read their examples in class, thanking individual students for making the mistakes as an opportunity for learning for everyone. Ask the class first what is right about the example, and then how they would correct the errors. Be sure to very clearly and sincerely thank the person who gave the example in front of the whole class. In subsequent classes, refer to mistakes as learning opportunities.

5. Help students clearly see their own progress or lack thereof. Many students have a fragmented, distorted and fatalistic view of their school experiences. Try grading by portfolio for a more integrated and realistic view. Have the students collect their work over time in one place and present it to you. Provide checklists and rubrics so students will be clear on your expectations. Provide frequent opportunities for students to update portfolios and re-submit poor work. Retain the poor work with the better work as part of the portfolio. Randomize names and grade the top 5 frequently to keep students sharp and yourself sane.

from Sza again.

right now I am being overwhelmed by school. I have five classes at two different community colleges.
Two classes at CC1 I have taught for the last six years. They are fairly easy to teach, though there is a lot of grading. They are composition classes after all.

Then at CC2 I am teaching a freshman comp and a freshman lit class. It doesn’t matter that I have taught freshman comp for six years because I am using a new book. (That happened last semester at CC1.) And their requirements are different. So I am really flaying about trying to get my feet.

And I have a lit course which I must teach to follow their specifications, without a novel. (Totally different from at CC1 where we have a novel and the research paper is over that.) I’ve never taught the class without a novel. It’s quite a shock to my system.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on drama, because I don’t love it, but I have to have something the students can do their research papers on. So that means drama. But I did decide to throw out Othello; it is just too long. We are going to do Glaspell’s Trifles instead and another short play. That gives us a lighter day and we can work on other aspects of the paper, etc.

I don’t love working from new books. That is difficult, because I don’t know how long things are going to take. But I am doing okay.

The worst part (besides grading for five classes and having to write syllabi for two new classes) is that I’ve messed up my grades. My MW freshman comp has gotten five grades. My TTh freshman comp class has only got two… I messed up and didn’t give the TTh class the freewriting. I thought it was the MW class that was behind, so I gave them another freewriting on Monday. Ouch. Now I’ve got to catch the TTh class back up. That will be a struggle.

because I noticed that my classes at CC2 are about an equal mix of black, white, and Hispanic while my classes at CC1 are predominantly white?

Racism is prejudice or discrimination based on the belief that race is the primary factor determining human traits and abilities. Racism includes the belief that genetic or inherited differences produce the inherent superiority or inferiority of one race over another

(found via Google using “definition racism” as the search terms and clicking on web definitions)

I guess not. Whew. That’s a load off my mind.

During a discussion with the head of my department, we realized that I like genre challenged works.

What does that mean? It means that I like to teach, and do teach, works where the genre is either unclear or where several different genres (whatever you mean by that) are mixed up together.

Is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland adult literature or children’s literature? People argue for adult literature because of the preponderance of the minor theme of death, of the scariness of the tale, and of the narcotic using caterpillar. They argue for children’s lit because it is fantastical, was written for a child, and was originally children’s lit.

Then we have the fact that saying a work is an adult or children’s lit genre doesn’t exclude the application of other genres to the work.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is clearly speculative fiction, but is it fantasy or horror?

If it is fantasy, is it low fantasy or fairy tale fantasy? (Carroll clearly was leaning this direction himself because he added a “fairy’s” comments at the beginning of the work.)

It is clearly an implausible story, one of Princeton’s definition of fairy tale. (They also said this was told as an excuse. An excuse for what?)

And it is clearly a smaller part of folklore, as Heidi Anne Heiner at Sur La Lune indicates. It was first told to Alice Liddle on July 4, 1862 and changed at least three times even once it was written down, until its publication on July 4, 1865.

According to Tolkein’s presentation of fairy tale the work is one since the story does take place in Faerie, the diminutive size (which he says we may reject but which it is not necessary to reject in this particular work) simply emphasizes it.

And at Heiner’s site, I find a quote that details just my problem with presenting “genre” to my students, in a quote from Jack Zipes’ “Introduction: Towards the Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.

…[I]n fact, the literary fairy tale is not an independent genre but can only be understood and defined by its relationship to the oral tales as well as to the legend, novella, novel, and other literary fairy tales that it uses, adapts, and remodels during the narrative conception of the author.

Exactly.

So, what are my other “genre challenged” favorites?

Frankenstein. Is it science fiction or horror? Is it gothic? (And is that a genre?) I would say that it is definitely romantic (tradition) gothic (sub-tradition) speculative fiction. Whether it is sci fi or horror probably depends on your definition of those sub-genres. So…

Gulliver’s Travels. It is speculative fiction and fantasy. But what kind of fantasy is it? Is it a fairy tale? It is clearly an improbable tale, but is that its main point, its focus? Is it part of travel literature? (A very popular genre at the time Swift wrote, but pretty much non-existent now.) It is satire. (That’s a genre too, but of a different type.) It’s a social statement. … But what is it specifically?

Note that I wrote my dissertation on genres and attempted to define the genre of missionary newsletter. (So I’ve been doing this a while.)

to think on my feet. To answer questions I haven’t thought of.

For instance, while examining images in our book, we came upon a Got Milk: Born to Shop ad. (Other Got Milks can be seen here.)

In this ad the woman has about twenty beautifully colored bags, is in a short skirt and high heels, and looks fresh and rested. I commented on the high heels for shopping.

One of my students said, “What is it with high heels?”

I answered some, but I wasn’t thrilled with my answer, so I came home and looked up other things.

Today a student asked, “Why are we studying art in English?”

I gave my standard, you need English in every field spiel. I mentioned the guy who lost a $150,000 dollar raise because he didn’t write well enough.

But I don’t think I did a great job with it.

And later the student asked, “Why aren’t we doing English-y stuff like thesis?”

I told her we were working on just writing. And we’re moving towards that English-y stuff.

But I want a blog so I can post better answers and the students can go read and comment and maybe we’ll get a whole community going… Or maybe not.

So, if you want to see what we came up with go to Davis English.

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are artists.” –Marcel Proust

The first answer, the one I gave in class, is that we are reading (English) and writing (English). It just so happens that our subject is art.

We are reading critically, by examining “Ways of Seeing” by Boorstein.

We are writing about our experience with art, what we think of art, and how art has impacted our lives. We are also writing about the arguments concerning art that the essay made.

Another point that I did not think to make in class is that art is all about the details. So is a good essay. In both the creation (looking for details to make the sense clearer) and the presentation of an essay, details matter. In a way, an essay is a piece of art, written art.

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head and the heart of man go together.” –John Ruskin, English, 1819 – 1900

Part A
is all about elements of design and principles of design.

Part B covers composition and style.

Art in a Cultural Context examines six artists through their culture. The way they do this, you don’t even have to know who the artist is.

This is the page for 1350 BC, Egypt.

This is the first page for Greece 450 BC.

Part A
is all about elements of design and principles of design.

Part B covers composition and style.

Art in a Cultural Context examines six artists through their culture. The way they do this, you don’t even have to know who the artist is.

This is the page for 1350 BC, Egypt.

This is the first page for Greece 450 BC.