Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Glassy eyes, blank stares
Next time I need to find an inductive way to go about the class. We talked about genre, 'the essay' and their impressions of what 'type of writing' Sedaris's and Anzaldua's pieces might be. In spite of the cover, no one guessed that they were essays. They've been thoroughly poisoned against essays by their high school experience, but even in encountering the near revelatory experience of discovering that they actually enjoyed reading an essay, glassy eyes and blank stares. I feel like I might find some revelatory insight of my own once I get through all of their papers, but if they're not actively entertained or verbally engaging with others, it's hard to fend off the yawns and dead eyes . Nothing new, I'm sure, but many of them wrote about how 'if you don't have a picture, it's like it didn't happen,' so what does that mean for their classes? Should I provide a single, comprehensive/cohesive image for each class? A few midterms & the threat of a comprehensive final might make a difference, but I'm not sure that's the kind of desperate focus I'm looking for. So instead, I'll try to stick with a more thoroughly though out inductive approach coupled with some kind of group work/collaborative in-class assignment. I'm thinking split them up and have them present an issue to the class. The stress of performing for the group with 20 minutes notice might work...
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I throw in pictures and video clips. The idea is to hit all quadrants of their massive brains aka, skulls full of mush (Limbaugh) in an effort to hit more than the 10-ish percent of the left prefrontal cortex.
ReplyDeleteL
This is actually one of the reasons I really like "Inventing the University" despite its problems: the insight that students have been habituated to letting the voice of Very Serious People short-circuit their own thinking, inquiry, etc.
ReplyDeleteI am always trying to figure out how to jolt them out of this passivity: in my nicer moments, I ask them to imagine they could write in a way that would make someone want to read or in workshops have us identify where in essay we are or are not interested and then discuss why. In my blunter moments, I follow Bill Coles in calling students on the dead language and dead thinking.