601: Syllabus Ideas

Posted on 31 October 2007 | Leave a comment

I want my students to create a visual rhetoric defining their stance. Who are they? Where do they come from? What are their beliefs? What are their interests? I assume I will have them write some sort of literacy narrative as well. I also would lihe them to analyze someone else’s rhetorical device, like magazines, or news shows, or YouTube or something? I know I want to include a cellphone clause, a hate speech clause, etc. I also want to begin the class by everyone talking about who they are through some actual objects they bring to class. I am not sure. This weekend I need to break down my syllabus. Saturday’s project. Attendance policy: you can miss twice after that your grade is affected?

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605: Presentation PPT

Posted on 31 October 2007 | 1 comment

Our power point is nearly finished for Friday. Talk about an exhausting project! You never know that something could end up being so exhausting until you are in the midst of it. I think I can attach it here, but the computer geniuses tell me no. I think I can, but I don’t have the time right now to figure it out. How much easier it would be to keep all of my school stuff right here.

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Posted in Rhetoric

Relevant: Year of the Bible

Posted on 30 October 2007 | Leave a comment

I have a love/hate relationship with Relevant magazine, but they frequently bring out an 800 words that I love. This is one. Click here if you want to read it. The story was also covered in more depth in the Christian Century, and you can access the author’s website here and read an excerpt here. I think it is a good idea to try to take the Bible literally, but one comical vignette of him doing so involves him bringing pebbles with him so he can stone people in the Subway tunnel. He decides that there is therapy in stoning them, but that doing it with pebbles is strange. It is an interesting read.

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Day One: Formulating Ideas

Posted on 30 October 2007 | Leave a comment

I am going to start using this space to knock around my ideas for my research projects for class, too, so if it doesn’t interest you, stop reading now.

Victorian: I am writing about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I am tentatively calling my paper Undressing Tess. So far, what I know is that in the Victorian Age, clothing signifies a person’s class, their gender, their occupation, and can also signify a woman’s status as fallen. In Tess, the main character, Tess, is a lower-class woman whose family is actually in the line of an aristocratic family. Tess, however through the manipulation of her family and their desire for upward mobility, is a fallen woman, so her status is mutated. She is outcast. Tess’s child, while he should be swaddled, is a symbol of Tess’s connection to nature. She undresses in the field to feed him. She never actually has an “acceptable” clothing until the end when she is married to the man who fathered her child. All this, of course, is complicated by the love triangle between she and the two men: Alec and Angel, the baby’s death, and the murder of Alec. At the end of the story when Tess dies, she lies upon the altar stone at Stonehenge, returning to her natural significance. In many ways, the story is cyclic, and Tess’s clothing reminds of her status at each cog of the wheel.

Contemporary Brit: I am writing about Miss Jean Brodie and the role of fascism and the homosocial/lesbian continuum with the pack of girls. I am not sure how this paper is going to flesh out, but I think it will have something to do with the elitism experienced by the girls in the Brodie pack and their training in the fine arts. How does that compare with Hoggart and Williams and their desire to keep the fine art fine? How does it relate to the fact that fascism was a movement of the people? How does that relate to schooling post-war in Britain? What does it mean that Spark is looking back on all this from a twenty year, post-war vantage point? How can this all work together to make one cohesive argument about the character who becomes a nun?

I am not sure about my school stuff right now. Maybe I should have aimed higher and tried to get into a more “impressive school.” Would there be so much B.S. there? I need to take French.

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Posted in Victorian

So I Changed My Mind

Posted on 30 October 2007 | Leave a comment

I am no longer going to clog this blog (I made a rhyme) with my school stuff. I made another blog to record my research thoughts. You can access it here. I wanted to keep this, as my other blog indicates, as a haven for my whimsical fantasies: really just a place to keep my life thoughts in order.

I got observed teaching today and it went really well. The professor who observed me said that there was very little she would have differently, I have good chalkboard writing, and an excellent speaking voice, which I know how to use. It was nice to hear some positive feedback, because I have doubted myself quite a bit throughout the semester in my teaching class. It was pretty funny, though, because I went to her house yesterday for a baby shower and she mentioned that her favorite color was purple (it was one of her wedding colors). On my way out of her house, she said: I’ll see you tomorrow and remember, I grade on costuming. Today I wore my purple LL Bean sweater and my purple trousers. She mentioned that I had on her favorite color. I know, I said, you told me costuming counts! Not to mention that my favorite color is purple as well.

It was a good day, and if Jim and I make until Friday for our presentation with no major meltdowns, it will be a good week. I just feel like this project is consuming me. Every time I turn around there is more to read, write, or contemplate. The survey that we sent out to the Spectrum members has proven to be an excellent tool, and surprisingly, we have received quite a few of those back. More than I expected. I am looking forward to going to the meeting on Thursday, and explaining our project to the students and letting them ask questions and talk freely to us about their experiences at BSU. So far, most of the students think BSU is pretty gay-friendly, which is shocking and good all at once.

Well, since it is 11:46 and I have to get up early to work on queer things, I should go to bed. Or at least pretend, and go watch TV.

And, yeah, we had to smell and inspect melted candy bars in diapers to see who could identify teh most of them. Fun baby shower games: the winner received, you guessed it, the same fifteen candy bars that were melted in the diapers. Ick.

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