[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]
When you’ve
been doing this as long as I have—finishing year 19 at FSU and 24 of teaching
overall this week—you can often see stand-out moments coming; that was
definitely the case with the Larsen and Zhang conversations I wrote about in
the last two posts, for example. But if I ever find myself entirely unable to
be taken by surprise, I’ll know it’s time to retire. Fortunately that
definitely isn’t the case yet, and of the many moments and days that surprised me
this semester, none stands out more than a phenomenal discussion in one of my First-Year
Writing II sections about this 1960s Post
Honeycomb Cereal ad. I found that ad at the last minute, looking through an
archive I had shared with the students and hoping to find a text that seemed
targeted toward kids (the subject of one of our scholarly article readings in
that unit), and—get ready for some pedagogical inside baseball—had not watched
it in full prior to sharing it with the students. And then it became the source
of the best discussion we had all semester in that section, with more than half
of the 18 students sharing thoughtful takes on choices and details in the ad.
Surprise stand-outs ftw!
Last
stand-out tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?
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