I stayed at work till almost midnight last night reading my students’ simpulan projects. The students in Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers work in groups to write a curriculum for a course of their own design that implements their ideas for teaching, especially teaching writing. Curricula is truly a new genre for these students. They’ve never read one before, little yet tried to write one, and they get very frustrated with themselves when it doesn’t come as easily as they expect writing to come to them.
Nonetheless, they always do a decent job, and occasionally produce something really awesome. I still remember one curriculum from five years ago called Exploring the American Immigrant Experience Through Literature that was just terrific. The former head of the social studies department at my old high school used it as an exemplar for her teachers. This year I read some good projects on the American Dream, Social and Political Change, Representations of Power, and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British and American Women Writers. The students who designed the Social and Political Change curriculum conceived of the ambitious goal of studying the evolution of media alongside developments in society, politics, and literature. So for the Puritan period they have the students studying sermons, and during the Revolutionary period studying broadsides, right up to blogging and social networking during the contemporary era, which they brought right up to the election of President Obama. The students took on a little more than they had the time to bring to fruition, but I really love the concept. One of their central ideas was to have the students learning about these genres by writing them. Imagine, in the first quarter students would be writing and delivering sermons, and by the fourth quarter they’re creating facebook pages with live-streaming blogs embedded within. Pretty cool idea if you ask me.
The young women who wrote the British and American Women Authors curriculum realized they had some serious knowledge gaps in their chronologies, but now they’ve made reading lists for themselves for the summer. My favorite email from them was the one in which they asked if I thought Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein had enough in common to be grouped together for the 1800-1850 British unit. I wrote back “Bertha, Heathcliff, and the Monster! What a terrific trio of characters!†In each case there’s an idealized Romantic character who is transformed into a tragic and vengeful killer (or would-be killer) by the rejection and mistreatment of his or her suitor. I was telling one of my friends about this proposed unit, and she wondered aloud why emotionally maimed men like Rochester and Heathcliff are so attractive to women, not just the Jane Eyres and Catherine Earnshaws of the world, but to real, living, historical women, too. In a recent article, Gina Barreca asked similar questions about the attractiveness of a character like Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. I guess it’s no more consternating than why men fall in love with the Hester Prynnes of literature and life, or with someone like my all-time favorite fictional character, Remedios Buendia from One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of whose suitors falls to his death just trying to get a glimpse of her showering. I guess those are questions to address in the curriculum.
At this point, while most of my colleagues here at UConn are finishing up the semester and getting ready for summer, I am entering what is our busiest time of year at the CWP, but I am looking forward to working with a stellar bunch of teachers at this year’s Summer Institute, and doing an independent study with one of my talented undergraduates. But since the semester is over here and the demands of the Summer Institute will be so great, I plan to write this column less frequently for a little while. I will resume weekly columns again in the fall.
My thanks to everyone who has been reading all year. I know there are more readers than is indicated by the postings because so many of you email me or mention to me in person that you enjoyed this or that column. I hope to see some of you at Recognition Night May 12, from 4-7 PM in Jorgensen Auditorium, or at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference on May 20. If I don’t, endure and enjoy the end of the year, have a great summer, and I will be back regularly in September.
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