Looking Forward!
Just received my teaching assignment for next year. First year MFAs teach freshman writing seminars, and typically teach the same course both semesters in order to minimize prep time and gain experience in refining a course. Unfortunately, poetry-centric seminars are not offered to new teachers, but I'll have to see if my supervisor will let me work a few poems into the following:
Cultural Studies
From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. This course is built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. We will analyze and write about cultural forms as texts to be read for what they tell us about men and women, wealth and power, race, nation, and technology. Readings may include fiction, films, advertisements, television shows, and essays on the theory of cultural studies.
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Question: Is it finally time to nuke my archives, or is it okay to be a messy, complicated human in the eyes of one's students? I've heard from people currently teaching that students regularly use Google, Facebook, etc. to check up on their teachers. Nonetheless, I have this nagging sense that I need a good justification to consciously self-censor.
Comments
Yes, it is okay to be a messy complicated human in the eyes of one's students. All of the teachers I've had that I responded to, as teachers, and really learned from, were (among other things) entirely open about being complicated messy humans.
And, clearly, you're not required to say anything here that you don't want to say in public.
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Recently read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, a quick, sharp take on media, thought, the struggle between ideas and images as forces in the culture, pretty much the whole spectrum of things covered in the course description you've posted here. Neil Postman is also the author of "Teaching as a Subversive Activity," a sort of half theoretical, half how-to book that everybody I knew was reading during the years I was in high school (early 1970's).
Another cultural studies source I like is the magazine The Baffler.
Just passing these along, for what it's worth.
Posted by: Lyle Daggett | March 11, 2008 01:39 AM