10.03.09
What are these kids watching nowadays?
The other day, while teaching Salman Rushdie’s story “Chekov and Zulu,” I was shocked–SHOCKED!!!–to discover that none of the students in my class knew anything about Star Trek: not the original show, not any of the movies, not any of the related TV shows.
It boggles my mind.
It’s also odd to me that I react to their lack of knowledge about this piece of pop culture in the same way I would react if they had said they had never read Romeo and Juliet. At what point did Star Trek become something we simply expect everyone to know?
09.23.09
Update: Discrimination found at Philly swim club
I posted on this news story when it broke a few months back:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32977870/ns/us_news-race_and_ethnicity/
A state panel has found probable cause of racial discrimination at a suburban Philadelphia swim club that asked a day camp group of mostly black and Hispanic children not to return, a ruling the club’s lawyer blamed late Tuesday on the “media firestorm” that followed the incident.
The Valley Club in predominantly white Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, has denied there was any racial motive behind its actions June 29, when children from Creative Steps Inc. day camp went to the club and their payment for swimming was refunded without explanation. The club has maintained that there were too many children for the number of lifeguards on duty and that many of the children who were at the club couldn’t swim.
[...] The state report also noted that other large groups that came to the swim club did not generate the same reaction. For example, a plumbing company has held an annual party at the club that draws about 100 to 125 people each year, about five to 10 of them black, the report said. It found that far more children were in the pool for those parties, yet no club members threatened to quit and guests did not report “inappropriate or rude comments” from club members.
09.19.09
Update on the Texas Curriculum Debate
Interesting proposal here about moving Chavez from a list of model citizens to a list of influential people–but then, if the model citizens aren’t also influential, how do we know who they are? Also, check out the final paragraph. Are students being asked to identify significant politicians from all perspectives, or just from the Right? (Keep in mind, this is Texas we’re talking about….)
Texas activists: Chavez, Marshall must be taught
Supporters argued that Chavez shouldn’t be taken out of fifth grade classes as suggested because he greatly improved conditions for Hispanic farm workers. Critics said he lacked the stature and impact to be listed next to the likes of Benjamin Franklin.
Lowe said the board would likely side with some teachers and other groups that said Chavez should be moved from a list of model citizens, which includes Franklin, to a list of people who contributed to society, such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.
A member of the advisory panel also criticized Marshall’s inclusion, saying he wasn’t a strong enough figure in the civil right movement to merit stronger reference.
“To say that Marshall is not a strong enough example … is an insult to his legacy,” said Banks, the NAACP spokesman.
In the draft proposal discussed Thursday, Marshall’s inclusion was added to an eighth-grade history course and remained in first-grade social studies.
Among proposed changes are to require students to identify “significant” conservatives of the 21st century, such as Newt Gingrich, and deleting references to Christmas and Rosh Hashanah. Lowe said Thursday the holidays would likely remain in the final plan.
09.13.09
How’s the semester going?
Well, my comp students have their first assignments due on Wednesday, so we’ll see how well I prepared them for this! They had to perform a rhetorical analysis of the selections we read from either Crevecoeur or Tocqueville. Their proposals looked good for the most part, so I’m optimistic. And of course I need to recall this is their first formal college writing, so anything intelligent they say will be a success. But I realize how quickly this assignment has come upon them and how complex the texts are–and I don’t want them getting frustrated by the difficulty level this early in the term.
Interestingly, it’s been political science week in my classes. My comp classes have read Tocqueville and Machiavelli on democracy, along with Locke’s discussion of civil society and Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration; my lit class read parts of Rousseau’s Social Contract alongside Voltaire’s Candide. So I’ve been swimming in ideas about what democracy and equality and freedom and human nature are and how they should be implemented in government etc. How do freedom and equality work together, and is democracy more dependent on one than the other? Is good government based on nature or is it constructed against nature? Hmmmm…..
The lit class is reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Diderot’s Supplement later this week. Very interesting texts. This is the first time that I’ve explored Enlightenment literature from the standpoint of how it views and used non-Western cultures, and it’s probably the first time I’ve really found the era interesting and not just annoying (Molière excepted–he’s always been the bright spot of the period for me). Discovering all these conflicts about what human nature is and whether Europe is really civilized makes the period so much more fascinating to me–who knew?!
09.01.09
What my classes are doing…
It’s a new semester–huzzah!
My classes are having good discussions. My 101s have been reading excerpts from Crevecoeur and have been doing some very nice work with the text–I’m very pleased, and I look forward to seeing what they do with the rest of the readings from the semester. I think these kinds of texts (I’m using Ideas Across Time as the textbook) inspire them to think about important and interesting topics (in this case, notions of America and of egalitarian society). They have enjoyed debating the definition of Americans and wrestling with how his account of his encounter with the caged slave affects that definition. I’m curious to see what they’ll do with Tocqueville’s distinction between equality and liberty. (Heck, I’m wondering what I’LL do with that distinction!)
My lit class had a great discussion–almost 60 minutes–on Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” I had to force them to move to the other short stories for the day (Premchand and Akutagawa). This week we read the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels–I hope we can lay a good foundation in cultural contact for our later discussions of how travelers write about their encounters with other cultures. I surprised myself by making a connection between Gulliver’s “enlightenment” about European society and the madman’s “craziness” regarding the Chinese culture of his day.
Rethinking an earlier post
A few weeks back I posted a couple of items about the ideal of higher education and the difficulties of 1) accepting more people into college, and 2) allowing for more technical ed for people outside the talented tenth (or even the talented half). Something’s been bugging me about those two articles ever since. I think it has to do with the relationship between earning a high school diploma and being qualified for an undergraduate program. In my mind, I’ve assumed that the two are coterminous–but that may be because for me and my peers, that was the case. But what if getting a high school diploma is not the same as being qualified for university education? How would that change the way we think about our higher education system, and how would it affect our efforts to make higher education more accessible to more people?
I wonder if my ideal of higher ed for everyone has made me assume that everyone can (and should) pursue their college degrees. And I wonder if this prejudice in favor of universal education has made me unfairly judge those who don’t go to college–either by choice or by lack of preparedness.
I guess the question is whether higher education is something that can and should be open to everyone or whether it should be restricted only to those who demonstrate the knowledge-base, the skills and the willingness to work that they need to succeed as junior academics. (And don’t even get me started on the problem of access to private college-prep schools! Maybe what we need is to redefine the public high school as a public college-prep system….)
08.17.09
Why Diversity REALLY Matters….
U.S. News & World Report has an interesting piece on diversity by Aaron Thompson from E Kentucky U:
Why Does Diversity Matter at College Anyway?
It’s a nice list, but it’s not challenging enough. It’s all very friendly and beneficial in the way that businesses would find useful.
But that’s also a problem. For a focus on diversity that doesn’t also demonstrate the continued presence of discrimination–deliberate or systemic–is simply being co-opted by the status quo. If diversity is to be valuable, it needs to challenge us to confront and improve the systems of the world in order to make our ideals of equal opportunity and equitable treatment two steps closer to reality.
Businesses want their workers to get along, and they promote diversity for this purpose. But what the workers need is not simply a harmonius environment, but a just workplace with fair business practices. For instance, it doesn’t do any good for banks to have a workplace where diversity is valued if the banks continue to charge minority clients higher interest rates on loans.
May we learn to teach diversity in ways that lead to positive change in the world.
08.06.09
Britain finds universal higher ed difficult to provide
Interesting article by William Underhill over at Newsweek:
Britain promised university for the masses. Turns out that’s a pledge no country could afford.
Here’s the passage that sounds most like things I hear in the States:
What worries academics is the dilution of standards that has followed from rising numbers and lower entry requirements. Too much time is now needed for remedial training essential to bring students up to the basic level needed for a degree, says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent. Serious education now only begins at the postgraduate stage. “It has just not been possible to reconcile traditional standards with the social-engineering imperative,” he argues. As a result, a whole approach to higher education is now under threat. After all, as Furedi puts it, a degree is not necessarily the benchmark of a good education.
This article has raised a whole host of questions for me about our own issues with providing almost-universal higher ed here in the States. I don’t know if Furedi would count as a conservative in U.S. terms, and I don’t know how the UK system structure compares to our own. His comments sound like things I hear a lot, especially from conservatives who worry about admitting “underqualified” minority students in the name of diversity, so I hesitate to agree with his sentiments too quickly. But they make me think about the common presumptions that 1) college is more and more necessary for a good career in the States, and 2) students are graduating from high school less and less prepared for the kinds of work we ask of them in college. (I have no idea how true either of those statements is–who has the statistics?)
I like the ideal of everyone earning a bachelor’s–but then my ideal of the degree is very liberal arts oriented: a degree in which young adults have had to think seriously about the foundations of the culture we live in, including political thought, religious and philosophical thought, scientific thought, artistic thought, etc. I think everyone would profit from this kind of education, even if they then move into technical, industrial or menial labor. And every student deserves the best education possible, whether it’s at Ivy U or at Small State School.
But the article makes me wonder about the equivalence of the B.A. degree from those two schools. And that problem leads me into a slew of questions that I am not able to address coherently right now, so I’ll leave it there….
08.05.09
Technical education for blacks: Booker T gets a new listen
I just saw this interesting article over at HuffPo:
David Jones re-opens the Washington-DuBois debate about education for blacks.
Jones notes that the Obama presidency testifies to the success of DuBois’s focus on giving black youths intellectual educations and getting them into the more-elite career fields. But he notes that the current recession is revealing how many black youths (those who were not part of the “talented 10th” that were groomed for higher education) are being left behind by not having the technical education that could provide stable careers.
No, being a plumber is not as prestigious as become a Harvard professor or Supreme Court Justice, but it would be a great career for the large numbers of blacks, whites, latinos, native americans, etc. who are not part of the “talented 10th.”
“In this highly globalized economy, having just generalized knowledge may no longer be enough to make it. I don’t think this is only true for Black high school students in the inner city. The time may have come when we have to be serious about both “tracks” to a middle class life: four-year colleges and the liberal arts and the career and technical high schools and post high school training that also leads to economic and social advancement. We certainly can’t continue the way we’re going now with the vast majority of Black young people dropping out or graduating with no useful skills to participate in this new economy.”
If it is still true that only 1/3 of Americans will earn college degrees, the question becomes: What kind of eduction does the other 2/3 of the country need in order to gain stable, livable employment?
Poetic Meter v? Musical Meter v? Fragmented Syntax
In my continuing attempts to “conquer” modern poetry, I’ve been slowly working my way through Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell’s book Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. This book is useful because it includes a large numbers of 20th-century English-language poets, gives each of them a separate section, and analyzes numerous examples of their prosody. It’s mostly helpful, although there are times when I’m not sure I’m hearing the same thing they’re hearing, and plenty of times when they seem much more affected by the poetic effects than I am. But in general, it does a good job of writing for the person who doesn’t already “get” modern poetry.
I think that this book may have helped me realize where my problems lie, especially with free-verse prosody: Read the rest of this entry »
