tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post114243355129107802..comments2024-01-28T03:35:51.182-05:00Comments on Reassigned Time: "I mean, that's just, like, the rules of feminism."Dr. Crazyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142529211051675872006-03-16T12:13:00.000-05:002006-03-16T12:13:00.000-05:00Thanks for all of the responses. As for the sugge...Thanks for all of the responses. As for the suggestions for how to deal with the students, what I didn't say is that I'm in the middle of a conference week in which I'm meeting with them all individually, so I've actually had the opportunity to talk in a non-threatening one-on-one way with each and every one of these students (lucky me). I suppose my post came from my general sense of these issues more than from a specific problem I was having with dealing with students, though the specific problem of their papers was the inspiration for the post, if that makes sense.Dr. Crazyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142493206272902752006-03-16T02:13:00.000-05:002006-03-16T02:13:00.000-05:00I think that you're not imposing gender on them; t...I think that you're not imposing gender on them; they've brought it up themselves, no? And the way I'd handle it (as you probably already know and will do yourself) is to just say to them what you're saying here, only phrased as a question: "many of these papers are arguing that young people are easily influenced by the media. but you yourselves are young people, and it seems that the arguments you're making in these papers are critical of that. do you think you, yourselves, are that easily influenced?" etc. etc.bitchphdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15118578280520171800noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142483866566516192006-03-15T23:37:00.000-05:002006-03-15T23:37:00.000-05:00I think all writing teachers know the "women have ...I think all writing teachers know the "women have been brainwashed" paper by heart. A professor at my former University taught me a mantra: "They're just 18. They're just 18. They're just 18." It helps. Her thinking is that they're learning feminisim, and that means getting through all of the women-are-victims stuff first, especially since many college students think that gender equality totally exists because their dads cooked sometimes.<BR/><BR/>The way I handle this in my classroom is that when I give an umbrella topic that relates to gender or pop culture, we have a discussion about it, with me just asking questions and them doing all of the discussing. Usually, the students will straighten each other out. When they don't, I start asking questions that require analyzing personal experience (How many of you expect to get married, and why? is always an eye opener).<BR/><BR/>And then I go back to my office and chant.Tree of Knowledgehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14037710157338503215noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142470357226104892006-03-15T19:52:00.000-05:002006-03-15T19:52:00.000-05:00One of my strategies (which sometimes but not alwa...One of my strategies (which sometimes but not always works) is to drag my students (kicking and screaming) back to a text -- whether it's an article, an ad, or a personal narrative of their own. If a student wants to explain a clear example of how s/he was brainwashed by some particular media text/agency/socioeconomic institution, then we have something to work with, something to analyze. And, actually, sometimes they have such stories, which can usefully complicate the Bad Media vs Little Girls picture.Melhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18101745666402341618noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142465695045095252006-03-15T18:34:00.000-05:002006-03-15T18:34:00.000-05:00I don't have anything profound to add right now......I don't have anything profound to add right now...but I wanted to say that this is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking posts I've read in a while. Thanks. I'll look forward to the reply-to-Derrick, too!Terminal Degreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16523014953046778630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142451041920651452006-03-15T14:30:00.000-05:002006-03-15T14:30:00.000-05:00really interesting, doc.i remember teaching what s...really interesting, doc.<BR/>i remember teaching what sounds like a very similar course a few years back "women, writing, and america." (freshman writing--and I used Bordo's "The Ideology of Hunger" and they ate that shit up, pun intended). of course, your course is not directly about gender, which makes a real difference. i too have gone into freshman comp, and found this kind of resistance.<BR/><BR/>the gender class was one of the most positive experiences of my teaching career, but there were some shocking experiences there--like finding out how many of my female students <I>did their fricking lame-ass boyfriends laundry</I>. i too was leery of making this a "let me tell you why you need to be a feminist" course. but before I had to respond with a "you're kidding me, right?" reponse, the other women in the course, so appalled by what they heard, did it for me. <BR/><BR/>as for "teaching" feminism. I think that much of this type of critical inquiry can be taught effectively with traditional rhetorical analyses. like you say, nothing exists in a vacuum. unpacking, and looking at audience, context, purpose, etc can easily help us introduce issues of broader cultural contexts--whether you are looking at the rhetorical standpoint of a snuggles ad, or a political campaign ad. and yes, sometimes asking students to examine things from a perspective other than their own requires supplementary readings. <BR/><BR/>maybe this can be feminism under the radar. but sometimes, just sometimes, you have to say "you've got to be fricking kidding me."gingajoyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01356643079413822527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142449986813935122006-03-15T14:13:00.000-05:002006-03-15T14:13:00.000-05:00That totally helps, Derrick, and I'll be happy to ...That totally helps, Derrick, and I'll be happy to respond to it in an actual post (for it should not be buried in comments, as I think that other readers will have things to say about it as well). Thanks for the request and for the explanation of what you want me to talk about!Dr. Crazyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142449048703746812006-03-15T13:57:00.000-05:002006-03-15T13:57:00.000-05:00Ok, now that you've clarified your point I think t...Ok, now that you've clarified your point I think that we are more in agreement than in disagreement. I should note that we haven't only read pop-culture texts in this course, though we primarily have focused on those. This decision, as much as it is a political one on my part, is also a pragmatic one: I can't fight the good fight about exposing students to important cultural artifacts in my writing classes. Why? Because it's hard enough doing it in my other two classes that I teach. When I revamped my writing courses this summer, I consciously removed a lot of the higher-brow stuff from them, not because I don't think that students should be exposed to higher-brow things, but because i can't be all things to all people in all of my classes. It became a matter of changing the courses to allow me to be a human being. With the four course load, it's just not possible (for me) to do it all without cutting some corners. Thus, I've turned my writing courses to a more pop-culture emphasis and I focus most of my energy on trying to teach students how to make their writing coherent. In my lit courses, I spend energy on teaching things like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to students who claim never to have read a book. Ever. It's a trade-off. And thus I step down from the moral high ground. :)Dr. Crazyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142447099492700422006-03-15T13:24:00.000-05:002006-03-15T13:24:00.000-05:00Derrick,I don't think you're clueless at all. I m...Derrick,<BR/>I don't think you're clueless at all. I mean, really - you read my blog, and so that makes you one smart cookie :) Kidding, kidding. But really, I don't think you're clueless. I would like you to say more about what you're asking me to talk about, though, about somebody like you being a stakeholder. What exactly would you like me to talk about, so that I can respond to you adequately?Dr. Crazyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20099192.post-1142440724794785742006-03-15T11:38:00.000-05:002006-03-15T11:38:00.000-05:00"In short, I would do my best not to route gender ..."In short, I would do my best not to route gender discussions through The Media or Mean Girls in particular--they construct their audience as stupid & said audience just reproduces said stupidity."<BR/><BR/>Yeah, see, I just don't agree with you on this. First of all, I'd say that if students can't talk about everyday things in a sophisticated way, that we're not educating them for the real world. As much as I don't believe that the job of a liberal arts education is necessarily a professionalizing one, I do believe that giving students the tools to evaluate the "texts" of their worlds (which are most likely to include popular culture texts, like a movie like Mean Girls, which I honestly think is kind of smart in places and which none of my students wrote about - I chose the quote on my own because I think that it illustrates the thing I'm talking about - and no, I'm not kidding) is important. The reality is that students aren't likely to have a water-cooler chat about a Joanna Russ story. Ever. If we only teach them to evaluate gender, race, etc. through such "authorized" texts, like Literature or Fiction or Art or any of those capital-letter-cultural-capital-bearing-texts, they won't necessarily see that they can translate those skills and use them for the evaluation of other kinds of non-authorized texts. <BR/><BR/>Also, I don't believe in the premise that we shouldn't think critically about texts that construct their audience as stupid. In fact, I think that those texts demand that we critique them. And as a professor, I feel like I need to impress upon students that things they see as "just entertainment" or as not worthy of academic inquiry are precisely those things that take up the majority of their time. If we don't learn to evaluate those things and pay attention to them, what ultimately is the point of the humanities?<BR/><BR/>I should say, though, that you may be right about the fact that students may write this kind of paper because they think it's what the instructor wants. My question, then, would be, though, who wants these papers? Is it people in women's studies or intro. to multi-culti classes who want them? Because I certainly don't.Dr. Crazyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12457967076373916629noreply@blogger.com