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This week seems to be less exciting for the students in both classes. In the morning (discovery) class the week started out with advertising, and then moved to poetry. (Obviously the two belong together… ?) While students seemed to be entirely confused about why I might want them to look at the ads I was giving them—and, let’s face it, the more magazines you flip through, the better you are at tuning out those pesky pages—they all did a good job at them. First I broke them into groups and asked them to brainstorm together, and present to the class what was happening in their ad.
I set the assignment as first a straight description, followed by an analysis/interpretation, based on the central question: “why might the advertiser have chosen to include/portray that element.” After speaking in front of the class, and having the rest of the class make occasional extra observations, I asked the students to write a one page analysis—no introductory paragraph that tells me advertisements are used to sell clothes, just getting straight to the point. Description, detail, interpretations and analysis. I do find it interesting that the students seemed to think it was a silly exercise, and then, comparatively, they were really very good at it. I was talking to Samantha Pinto, a member of the faculty at Georgetown, about this, and she said that students she teaches in her general writing classes also really respond to the visual. Is it to do with our attention span?
And then on to poems. We looked at three poems, one by Gwendolyn Brooks (‘We Real Cool’—it definitely fits the class theme…) and two by Seamus Heaney—‘Digging’ and ‘Clearances #4.’ Pretty much anyone who has ever met me has heard me rave about the latter. It ended up being a line by line activity—yesterday I think I probably did too much of the reading myself. In part I was demonstrating, I guess, the types of questions/difficulties you encounter when reading a poem, but in part I was just giving into the urge to fill the silence. Not absolute silence, but that waiting for someone to speak up.
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Then there are my afternoon students. Perhaps I’m back to confusing them. This week is meant to be print media—so a lot of it is dry compared with what we were looking at last week. I got a greater sense of engagement from the students when we were looking at narratives than this week when we’ve been looking both at narrative essays and more theoretical/historical writing.
Monday they managed to distract me altogether—by distract me, I mean to say that I taught a class I had been going to leave for the final week. We looked at some websites, including my Facebook page. I wanted to look at social networking as a means of representation—two of my students showed the class their myspace pages and we talked about the ways people use these to create an online identity for themselves. It was interesting.
Yesterday, though, we got back to the plan and looked at some reading on sociology, as well as David Brooks’s article “The Organization Kid.” Most weren’t particularly interested in the sociology—one student found it really interesting, but others were resistant to it. It was very much on the “introducing concepts” side. Plus, I guess in part since I’m not trained in sociology I found it difficult to know how to approach it, given their lack of enthusiasm. Then we talked through the David Brooks article—I was initially expecting the students to be really resistant to this piece from the Atlantic that depicted them as incredibly goal-oriented, to the extent that the writer portrays a concern with character and moral integrity lacking. That the writer is basing a large series of generalisations—in which he isolates some features of the students attending Princeton, and then writes these features can be read across the “younger generation” in some measure—on the conversations he had with a few dozen students. Especially since these are students he found from having their professors send their details to him, rather than making contact himself.
I had my own reaction to this as a piece of writing, and the surprise came when the students probably recognised more of the piece of writing than I did. Assume nothing, Kate. Outside the Writing Center, I haven’t spoken to a lot of current undergraduate students in America—it was an interesting discussion. I wonder if it was more interesting for me than for them? I was mostly surprised that no-one really seemed to want to argue against the assertions that Brooks made. They thought some were exaggerated, but didn’t have a lot to say.
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The New York Times article was about the sudden market for designer sunglasses. (Honestly, I thought that had been big business since Tom Cruise put on his Raybans in the 1980s.) There were really varied responses. A couple of students admitted to going out and spending some pretty serious money on sunglasses, and to having the brands named in the article. Another student said the whole thing was a waste of paper. There’s a fine line there between a report on a fashion trend, and the creation of hype for certain brands and certain shops—the article starts with a high-end sunglasses emporium. Name the shop. Name the brands and styles of the moment. Name the price, just in case anyone knows their friend has a pair, but never found out how much they cost. The debate that started up (and led, somehow, from sunglasses to crocs) was quite vigorous—but was also still on the surface level. How to dig in?
We ended by looking at some advertising images online that I found, and talking through the types of strategies that the advertisers were using. Tomorrow we’ll do some work with the print advertisements I distributed.
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I’ve got to forge the link back to representation, and the “so what?” critical questions that were lacking in looking at the images and videos today. Fingers crossed. Next week it’s back to fun stuff, but there’s still some work to get through this week.