Week 4 stats: down to 17 students. Half have a working problem definition; the other half's problem is that they've got no problem (or no research) at all. So far half of the quiz-takers think Spiegelman is an anarchist and a third that the phrase "vital, unpretentious ephemera" refers to the towers themselves or to our memory of them. I hope the numbers are lying, and that come Monday I'll have seventeen passable thesis statements, working bibliographies with 10 sources, 3 quotations printed out, and a partridge in a pear tree... oh wait, break is well over. I think I'll do what Andrew has done (with some success, it seems!) and ask them to email their thesis statement to the listserv by Monday evening.
On difficulties: for those students who don't have problems or sources yet, the difficulty seems to be getting up the nerve or the motivation to actually start something they know will be difficult (research). Alternately, that they think this will be easier and less time-consuming than it really is. I don't think the research topics around 9/11 are any more difficult than "the working poor", and emphasizing the "agent", the bad guy, the responsible party has helped a number of students: who do you pin this failure on, or at what level does this problem need to be solved? One of my favourite keywords is detail--the expertise is in the details, or at least detail is indicative of a certain level of reading and research. Specific dates, names, numbers, places, sentences, events... but for all the detail or expertise the best students collect on their particular problem, I am constantly surprised at the difficulty of starting discussions about the big picture. Is this because they really have nothing to say about 9/11, or because they have only cliches and loaded words? Because Spiegelman is easily skimmed and only understood with careful attention, or because they can dismiss it as a comic or personal narrative (and therefore "biased")? I think part of what they're waiting for is a clue from me as to how to interpret, what answer they're supposed to be giving; perhaps I should emphasize earlier and more consistently that they are not judged or graded solely on what they argue, but rather on how they argue it.
And moments: the closest I've come to everyone being actively engaged in the discussion was last quarter, over censorship and word choice. We were discussing United 93, and someone mentioned the "political correctness" of humanizing at least one of the terrorists, which made an interesting counterpoint to other comments about the ease of empathizing with their emotions. This led into some helpful territory about the film's release at a distance of five years from the event, and into a discussion of other forms of political correctness or self-censorship: the earlier Spiderman trailer removing the clips with the twin towers, the talk of changing the second Lord of the Rings title from The Two Towers. These cultural/political crossovers seem to resonate, as when we discussed the changing face of the James Bond bad guys over the decades in relation to the Iron Man trailer. And they make a good lead-in to word choice in essays--pulling all the pathos-laden adjectives and descriptions of tragedy, evil, terror, even illegal versus undocumented--which some students object to as overly PC, a kind of white-washing. The tendency is toward semi-sensational newspaper prose rather than (for them dry and uninspiring) academic "objectivity".
Inconclusion: none, really... or rather, exactly that: to be continued, as always.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Wise comments, especially about fear or reluctance. I think this is a brain thing. I read once that human brain isn't even done developing till its about 22 years old. It's funny what blind spots they have about creating, arguing, struggling with a thesis: either it's impossible to imagine, really, in terms of seeing at all. (They don't even seem to read their actual work for internal logic or meaning) Or it's easy (reductive, silly, illogical).
Post a Comment