You're a Hippie Liberal, I'm a Hippie Liberal

When John Trimbur wrote, "the writing classroom has the intimacy of home," I thought Is he kidding (194). When he compared teachers to parents, I thought No Way! But then I began to consider how much teaching reminded me of being a mother. I call my grown-up students "kids" and threaten them with my mom voice. I have complained, on more than one occasion, feeling more like a parent that a professional. Still, I'm not sure Trimbur can claim that teachers act in loco parentis. If anything, we are the parent's evil twin, the academic antiparent.

Parents teach children to obey, to follow rules without question. "Do as I say, not as I do," etc... Liberal Arts instructors want only for their students to open their eyes, to at least be willing to question the rules. Writing on cultural studies, Trimbur claims that there is a "danger of representing students as cultural dupes," but in their freshman fawn-like state, that's exactly what they are (198). I can't tell you how many times I've seen a student roll their eyes and say "It's just a book," or "Can't we just enjoy a movie without having to pick it apart?" I think parents want teachers to act in loco parentis. Their worst fear is a hippie-holdover liberal in the classroom. Someone who will force them to rethink cultural "truths" like Christianity, heterosexuality and male dominance. Trimbul believes that some instructors have turned education into an institution that serves the capitalist agenda. I believe that parents (and students) are the ones with the capitalist agenda, the ones who believe that education=money. Liberal Arts (or just plain liberal) instructors have a lot to do to work against this agenda, especially when the colleges and universities they work for are capitalist institutions run by people who believe money=education.

An Inauthentic Existence

In "The Loss of the Creature" Percy bemoans the loss of the observers sovereignty. He provides his reader with the example of a couple traveling through Mexico in search of that authentic experience. Believing they have found that experience in a small mountain village, they seek validation from a friend of theirs--an ethnologist. Percy writes, "What has taken place is a radical loss of sovereignty over that which is a much theirs as it is the ethnologist's" (54). Percy believes that the couple's feelings of "uneasiness" come from a perceived inability to judge authoritatively the authenticity of their experience (54). But Percy is wrong. The couple's uneasiness comes from an subconscious awareness that authenticity does not exist.
Let's consider the couple's experience. They show up in a small Mexican town on a day when a religious ceremony is being held. They spend their visit "observing the Indians and being themselves observed" (52). In this act of observance is the death of authenticity. The Indians will behave differently for the benefit of outsiders; the outsiders will be on their "best behavior" as not to offend the natives. Native and visitor are now performing to the expectations of their observers. Our American travelers seek validation of their "authentic" experience because deep-down they know what they have experienced is not authentic in the true sense of the word but an authentic performance.
The same can be said for the Shakespeare student. The difficulty is not in "salvaging the creature itself from the educational package" but in recognizing that the creature is an unknown value P--one that can never be known "authentically" outside the mind of its creator (57). The job of student and educator, then, is to recognize the unknowability of authenticity, to know that there is no right or wrong interpretation, that each reproduction, each re-reading is a new form of performance and to learn to respect the inauthenticity of that experience.

Designing a Syllabus

Recently, while attending the Pop Culture Conference in New Orleans, I took part in a round-table discussion about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. What I found most interesting about the discussion was the passionate responses of both lovers and haters (and love/haters) of the series. The round table reminded me of a discussion I had had, as a freshman, with lovers and haters of Harry Potter. What I've come to understand is that these fantasy series have a massive following. The stories have an overwhelming effect on readers and watchers of the movie spin-offs. They are not just books, they are cultural artifacts with social importance--an importance that young readers are virtually unaware of.
My theme for 102 is fantasy. Now I have to admit, I was a little lukewarm about my theme, until I started to teach it. Now I see fantasy everywhere--ideological fantasy, psychological fantasy, generic fantasy... So it comes as no surprise that I designed my syllabus with fantasy in mind. And I brought Twilight and Harry Potter along for the ride.
I am planning on teaching at a high school level, so I made a syllabus appropriate for teaching 12th graders. If teaching comp has taught me anything, it's this: high school students are not being prepared for college level work. I can understand the dilemma of many high school teachers. The drop-out rate is so high that the goal of many teachers is to keep kids in school long enough to graduate, and many of them are not interested in literature or writing. So how to overcome their resistance? Enter Twilight and Harry Potter, and maybe even a little C. S. Lewis. Why not have students read and write on things they're already interested in?
I created three major assignments for my fantasy unit: a rhetorical analysis on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; a group assignment that includes an annotated bibliography and class debate; and a critical analysis of Twilight or a combination of Twilight and the other two texts. This syllabus addresses the three areas that I feel highschool students are deficient in: Reading analytically and rhetorically, writing argumentatively, and researching academically. And they can learn all these things while discussing texts they are passionate about. How much fun is that?

Modality Mayhem

In her blog on Takayoshi’s and Selfe’s chapter “Thinking about Multimodality,” http://tatetalks.blogspot.com/ Heather Tate admits to being intimidated by modern-day technology. Her fear is a common one and one that I share. In the past, technology has always intimidated me. I considered my computer to be nothing more than a glorified word processor, one that froze up on me more times than I can remember. But creating blogs and wikis has broadened my technological horizon and like Heather, I think it's important to pass on that knowledge to our students. Southern Miss classes, however, are not really designed for multimodal teaching. Heather writes, "instructors will need to put in extra time training themselves." But I worry about the extra time instructors will need to put in to train their students. Most freshman classes are not smartrooms with computers and projectors; in fact, most are held in old buildings with twenty-year-old desks and faulty heating and air. How do we teach students without the proper equipment? One of two options comes to mind. One, we lecture and have the students take notes, or two, we take small groups of students to the library and show them how to create links or include photos into their papers. But neither option really seems plausible. First of all, we can't forget that as composition instructors, it is our job to teach our students how to write and writing instruction consumes a lot of class time. Can we really sacrifice hours of class time to technology instruction? Lecturing, moreover, is not really an effective way to teach computer applications. Students need to see and do first hand. As for the second option, is it really fair to expect grad students, poorly paid and severely overworked grad students, to meet with each student outside of the classroom? And can we expect our students to be willing to meet outside of class? I don't know about the rest of you, but I heard a lot of grumbling when my students learned that they would have to meet with groups of students outside of class for project four. Like Heather, I do think that "our composition courses could adapt some of our existing assignments to make them even more multimodular," but I have to say that that is going to be harder than it sounds. Remember how much time it took to explain to your 101 students how to include photos into their photo essays! Again, I think too much responsibility for training our freshman is being placed on comp teachers. Isn't their a way to get all departments involved in multimodal teaching? Wouldn't it be more effective if all disciplines encouraged their students to engage with technology? Or should we keep putting all the weight, and all the blame, on comp teachers?