Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Late, late, late

Please forgive my lateness. I managed to internalize the one-blog-a-week concept but entirely forgot the deadline. Thanks, Donna, for the reminder.

Like most of the class, I liked this week's Barnett readings more than usual. I was personally very attracted by Lindquist's essay. Like Lindquist, I'm particularly fascinated by the "connections between class, culture, and rhetoric...and...the public construction of knowledge in, and ultimately in the production of, working class culture" (166). Rhetorical approaches to an analysis of class give me an angle of thought I'd not considered thoroughly before. I'm now interested in Lindquist's ethnographic research--her creativity and choice of subject endear her work to me. Folklorists never tire of exploring barroom culture. I was so curious about her that I looked Julie Lindquist up, and discovered that she doesn't appear to have written anything else so close to folklore or ethnography.

I will use this article, perhaps as an assigned reading in Eng 1K, and maybe also in an intro to folklore class. The issues of class and construction of culture are, to me, integral.

Having just finished my lesson plans, I've got to say that I'm overwhelmed by the quantity of concepts we must teach in a short amount of time. I'm glad to know that we're really teaching for the future, and that we can hope for long-term results in our class, because I know it's going to be tough to not totally overload my students.

2 comments:

Liz said...

My lesson plans also proved a bit difficult than I had previously expected. I thought it would be fairly simple, as I seem to find something every week that I would love to institute in the classroom. When I realized, however, that I had 4 weeks to prepare my students for the first paper, I did not feel up to the task! I'm still not sure how much time to spend on any given subject. I tried to combine topics to some extent (i.e. tackling close-reading and essay structure by discussing how analyzing a poem informs the organization of the student's paper), but I still feel like my lesson plans need a lot of revision.

Court said...

I'm having the same problem as you two--I *want* to have a theme for the course and use challenging material as a pedagogical tool for student writing, reading, thinking, but the actual teaching of the writing seems to be what should be paramount, and I'm not sure if I'll be asking too much of them to do everything I want to do--especially in the first four weeks when the tone for the class will be set but while I need to have a graded paper back for each of them.

Court