[The final
papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must
be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments
from my
Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]
On how deeply
familiar texts can still sometimes evolve before our eyes.
As I mentioned
in my Fall
Preview post on the class, I’ve been teaching First-Year Writing I since my
first semester at FSU, and have used fundamentally the same syllabus throughout
that time. Of course it has evolved in various ways, but the core readings in
the first two units in particular—personal essays
and then short
stories, both drawn from those respective Seagull Readers for that genre—have stayed remarkably static for
these fourteen years. As I wrote in that preview post, I don’t believe in
reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinvention, not if something is
working well as this class overall and these units and stories in particular
continue to. But at the same time, it’s almost inevitable that readings I’ve
taught in a dozen sections across thirteen years are going to start to feel a
bit less fresh—not for the students, hopefully, for whom I hope they are
generally new and compelling; but at least for the guy in the tie at the front
of the room.
But if we
teachers stay open, keep reading and talking about these texts in that fresh
way that they are hopefully working for the students, then I believe we can
still find inspiration in them—and I had two specific examples of that phenomenon
this semester. In the personal essays unit, our last reading is Maxine Hong
Kingston’s “No
Name Woman,” the opening chapter of her book The Woman Warrior (1976). Kingston’s
dense and dark essay focuses a good deal on Chinese, Chinese American, and
immigrant American identities, themselves topics that open up to many important
2018 issues and conversations. But this time around, in the era of #MeToo
and Kavanaugh,
I was struck in particular by how fully Kingston forces us to examine violence
against women, across cultures and time periods and oceans. Her essay opens,
“‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’”
But Kingston breaks that cycle of silence, sharing the story of her murdered
aunt and of the hidden histories of misogynistic vitriol and violence that lie
behind her aunt’s tragic life and death. Such stories desperately need telling
and sharing, and Kingston’s essay took on even more significance for me in our
current moment.
I had a parallel
experience during the short story unit, this time courtesy of a wonderful
student paper (source of many
of my inspirations over these couple decades of teaching). The first story
we read in that unit is Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where
Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966), a tale of a teenage girl, a
predatory man, and 1960s popular culture (the story is dedicated to Bob Dylan, for
example). There are lots of ways to read Oates’s male antagonist, Arnold
Friend, but this student paper deployed the contemporary phrase “toxic
masculinity” to great effect in analyzing Friend and his attitudes toward
the story’s protagonist, Connie. The paper did two important things at the same
time: offered a new and compelling way to read this story, one that added to my
couple dozen prior readings of it; and reminded us that such cultural and
social concepts are not new (even if the phrases to describe them have
evolved), and that we have illustrations for them in literary and historical
works across American history. And of course, it also reminded me that no
matter how many times I’ve read a text or taught a class, each section and
semester brings new students whose perspectives and work can and will continue
to shape my own. Few lessons are more inspiring than that!
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Semester reflections you’d share?
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