Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Boxes... (or maybe this is next week

I must admit I did not take to the box assignment very much. I must echo our syllabus, “hmmm… boxes?” When first reading the chapter I was somewhat standoffish; I simply wanted a good ‘ol Bean reading for the week. However, once I read through Sirc’s examples for assignments creating/utilizing boxes, it made more sense. Once I got the full understanding I realized that this could be a creative, useful assignment for my class, specifically in response to my Hurricane Katrina section. As you may or may not know, during the storm many people, mostly store owners began to spray paint on their property different messages, which soon became an interesting facet to overall disaster. The simple spray paint became meaningful graffiti, which serious messages. I think that I could create an assignment using the box idea by having students search for pictures of the various graffiti (to get an overall sense), then providing them all with the same set of pics, having them interpret, and create different captions for each. Once again this would be to exemplify the many various ways different people view the same entity, and how in argument we should try to cover (at least in our understanding of our own argument/thesis) as many different p.o.v.’s as we can.

1 comment:

Katharine said...

Jenn,

I had basically the same reaction to the box chapter. Sort of, "Well, good...how does this help students write argumentative essays?"

Your assignment about graffiti gathering sounds like a perfect example. It also seems like a lot of stray objects (the word "detritus" came up in Sirc's essay) are generally associated with Hurricane Katrina. The box assignment of "found object plus student interpretation" could be a really interesting way to make sense of these fragments.