Of course, much of the fall programming on ShindoTV is teaching stories, and this is no exception. Much of my time now is taken up with preparing for classes, reading papers (sometimes I want to shoot myself in the head), running to and fro various campuses. This week I picked up a critical thinking class at the urban college from a professor who dropped it to reduce her course load. She was happy to get away from this group of people and now I know why.
This course focuses on race, class, and gender. This guarantees that there will be a lot of controversial topics, enough to make any white person/white wannabe* uneasy. White (male) privilege, that women and minorities still face discrimination, and that divide between rich and poor has become greater are recurring topics in this course. The professor warned me the group would be resistant.
They watched Crash before sometime before I took over the class. She told me the class had a discussion on it, but they weren’t quite finished. I tried to continue the discussion yesterday, only to get tightlipped silence. Even though I saw the film several times, nothing prepared me for this. Some people did talk about the film, but several of the more vocal ones tried to claim the discussion on Crash was over. I also got some other misleading ideas about the course from some other student, such as that the papers were two pages in length and that the readings weren’t due that day. This was definitely a Mona Lisa Smile moment if there ever was one. I felt a lot like Julia Robert’s character walking in on that horrid group of girls with another professor’s syllabus. However, my class was a horrid group of young men and women.
New syllabus, new rules, and much longer papers. They need their arses kicked.
Now on to a few other things. Chris made a comment in his latest entry about “making a concerted effort not to do a blog fade.” He mentioned a few of the blogs he read that seemed to hit blog death. No apologies for not posting, just a sudden stop. I don’t think that’s the fate of Chris’s blog.
There’s this one person on my blogroll who stopped posting altogether. He got himself a domain name to route it to his blog and no posting since some rant in July. He broke his silence to show off a T-shirt, but that’s was over twenty days ago. Is this blog faded? Hopefully, all isn’t quiet on the western front.
I saw Eureka last night. I still don’t know what to make of Stark beyond that he’s hot (as he is too complex to be a villain). Oh, alchemy turns out to be alive and well in Eureka and apparently has a very handsome practitioner. That’s all I’ll say on Eureka.
On a lighter note about teaching, I inflicted a Beavis and Butthead episode “Butt Is It Art?” on my freshman composition class in east county. The main point of showing the vid was to show cause and effect, though I wonder if my students only got a “boob” and a “butt” out of it. We also discussed Chris Crocker’s newfound fame as a result of Britney’s critically panned VMA performance and we watched his vid and Seth Green’s parody. Gotta love those smart carts.
Back to work. I have a long day tomorrow.
*this definitely applies to those conservative types.
