kids these days, with the sexting and the selfies and the changing modes of communication

I'm basically reposting this here (I wrote it on tumblr), but cleaning it up a little. It's a result of listening to a fairly recent episode of Roderick on the Line (podcast), and of showing "Blurred Lines" to my freshman comp class as an introduction to close reading 'text.'

I got Way Behind with my Roderick on the Line, because I am a terrible person who doesn’t deserve nice things like RotL. Anyway, washing dishes, listening to ep 78 (“Driving Lesson Costume”), I was intrigued by two things pretty quickly.
The discussion Merlin & John have about their respective daughters, and those daughters growing up, and their unease about certain aspects of that, was touching and adorable and hilarious. Really, I think the best advice to give them (as a daughter who grew up mostly successfully) is, to paraphrase Merlin, Just don’t be weird about it. Don’t make it weird. Young Lady Roderick and Young Lady Mann will be A-ok. they’ve got good parents.
Next: selfies taken in the bathroom mirror and sexting and what’s the point? Merlin says “If I was the kind of person who still read Roland Barthes, I would write about that” (or something similar. Quote marks here indicate speech, not accuracy in quotation).
A moment of conversation ensues, then John decides to behave precisely like a person who reads Roland Barthes and says something like: those naked mirror-selfies are more a form of communication than pornography. It’s about the real-time communication that a person is getting naked *for you*. If you look back, out of context, at the photo you’re like “eurgh, not the most flattering image.” But the context - the communication of “I’m naked RIGHT NOW for YOU” - is the only thing that really matters. That really has significance, in the “signs and signifiers and signification” sense of the word.
My mind, blown. Suddenly: all those out-of-context nakedy pictures one hears/sees about are stripped of their sexual content. They’re like reading a transcript of one side of a phone call, but not even the complete call. It’s almost meaningless.
So then I think about these naked selfies - the Kids These Days, teenagers sending around Naked Selfies to their teenage boyfriends or girlfriends or whatever - as not sexual. And….it kind of makes a really fucked-up sense.
One of the things I’ve noticed, teaching the Youth of America, is that they’re really weird about sex, or at least talking about it in class in the context of a specific novel or film. Now, I spent my college years being thoroughly repressed, except I went to a college that was basically one giant hippie orgy. It wasn’t just that there were groups of people who liked to walk around naked - outside, in public areas - or that everyone seemed to be having sex constantly, with someone, or that femynysts performed dance routines featuring smacking their ovaries, or that there were actual orgies. nope: there was also plenty of talk in classrooms, in academic, scholarly ways, about sex. This only got worse in grad school (where “worse” = “more frequent”). For a repressed person, I had to get unrepressed real fast, or be chronically uncomfortable and silent.

I’m used to everyone having a gutter mind. Everyone around me always did, it seems, from at least middle school on. *I* have a gutter mind. But the Kids These Days, in my classes, they don’t seem to. They are a weird mix of nonchalant “oh yes, pansexual multi-partner orgies involving unusual fetishes are totally the norm in high school” and red-faced, giggling, inability to say “have sex” in the context of a discussion of a novel in which characters, in fact, have…. you know.
As a kind of early practice in close reading, I had my freshmen watch the rather revolting video (unrated - topless girls) of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” And discussing it afterwards was shocking and revealing. Many of them were confused - openly, raising-their-hands-to-ask-questions confused - about various innuendo in the video. Like….what’s with him licking the ice cream? what’s going on with the feet? that’s really random….what was she doing with that stuffed animal?
I was shocked. Like seriously, actually shocked. “Blurred Lines” isn’t exactly a subtle video. And the sexual content just seemed to pass many of them by, or flat-out confuse them. This class meets too early in the morning for them to be actively trying to fool me, either - I think those were their honest reactions.
So: circling back to RotL: what if, somehow, the pornographic signification of sexting and such is  - if not totally absent, at least really watered down, for Kids Today? I don’t get the sense that THAT many of them are THAT much more sophisticated about sex and sex-adjacent stuff than repressed-me was in college. Some are, sure, but it doesn’t take much to exceed that low bar.
I guest-lectured in a friend’s class once, ages ago, probably my second year of teaching. And one of the boys in the class - one who was simultaneously too cool for school and sincerely smart and engaged - said something like “Nakedness doesn’t always mean sex.”
He was and is right, of course, but I wonder if - somehow, in these weird modern times of ours, with kids who grew up during the very conservative reign of GW Bush (remember John Ashcroft having the exposed bosoms of statues covered up in the Justice department building?) - I wonder if somehow nudity and sex - like actual sexuality - have been split apart in some odd way. So that they KNOW what is “sexy,” and that is “naked bathroom selfies” but it doesn’t register for many of them in a truly sexual way? That, again, it’s a way of communicating something - for straight girls, I imagine, it’s something like “I love you boyfriend so much i’m willing to do whatever will make you happy and sending you this naked picture of me in my bathroom mirror will let you know that i really care about you.” Or maybe "I'm cute and confident because I'm 16 and hot!"  But it has about as much sexual content to it, for them anyway, as would bringing the boyfriend chicken soup when he was sick.
If sexuality has become split in some way from nakedness, even from the idea of “sexy,” which basically means nothing very different from “pretty”, both of which just signify "attractive to the gender/sex i want to attract" that would explain an awful lot about the weird reticence of my students, and their inability to lie in the gutter and think about Robin Thicke's gross explicit video.

syllabus decision-making

I finally got my spring teaching assignment confirmed, a couple of weeks ago (right before thanksgiving, I think). Two sections of Introduction to Literature, each a long night class that meets once a week. This is a gift of a schedule, and I need to work it hard and rip through my dissertation. Truly.

I've learned lessons from my efforts at teaching Intro to Lit this fall. I think I approached it from a far too meta-level for the kind of students I had (mostly hard science majors, non-readers, skeptics of literary criticism). This spring, we're just going to read a whole slew of books.
Because the class only meets once a week, I have to make my choices even more carefully than usual. The once-a-week class can go fantastically well (cf fall 2009, fall 2008) or a bit draggy (cf fall 2007).

I'd been kicking around the "travel/geography" idea for awhile, and finally mentioned it to friends on facebook, who roundly approved the idea. I'm hoping this theme will help me articulate and develop some of my geography/place ideas for the dissertation, but more than that, it's a theme that allows me to include a very broad swath of texts, including some I adore.

Books I am determined to teach:

Gulliver's Travels - at least parts 1 & 4 (Lilliput and the land of the Yahoos)
Around the World in 80 Days, which I am currently reading for the first time (and giggling periodically, because I keep being reminded that my initial introduction to the text was as a very small child watching Muppet Babies, when Phileas Frogg - aka Kermit - was making a similar trip)

Neverwhere (Gaiman)
Un Lun Dun - because I want to teach China Mieville whenever I can

Mopsa the Fairy (Ingelow)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland...

On the Road (Kerouac! My old beloved Kerouac! I never thought I'd be teaching a Kerouac novel. Ever)

Then we reach the tentatives:
The Tempest (I really should include a play)
A Moveable Feast (not sure I can do it justice, to be frank)

some kind of science fiction - maybe a handful of short stories? - I'd like to include space travel. Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!" could be interesting (and terrifying). I just got, from the library, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, which may end up useful. I haven't started it yet; I'm working on Around the World, which is such an odd little book. It also satisfies by desire to have something that at least briefly mentions colonialist enterprises, and since there are some significant passages in both British India and non-British-controlled India, it'll work.

some kind of excerpt from Bachelard's Poetics of Space

I ought to include some poetry, but I feel so off my game when it comes to poetry. I can't think of much poetry that works with my theme, either - Eliot's Wasteland, but I KNOW I can't teach that. 


I have to remind myself not to add too much children's/YA lit, though of course that's where I'm most at home. One of the unfortunate aspects of teaching is that I'm always fighting the last war; I adapt my upcoming class based on the class I had most recently. This occasionally produces very good results, or at least interesting ones, but sometimes it backfires completely. Still, I am going forward with the assumption that my students will be skeptical of the literary merits of any book(s) written for younger readers, so I'm trying to keep a good balance.
I also need to not include Diana Wynne Jones on my syllabus, though I always want to. I've had far too many failures teaching her books (Howl's Moving Castle excepted - that almost always gets good reception), and I just can't take it anymore.  A particularly nasty student comment (on course evaluations) about Jones very nearly made me cry, and I am not going to be the one to cast pearls before swine. At least not until I recover from the experience of trying to teach The Merlin Conspiracy.
[note: I am reasonably thick-skinned about my evals. I can't please everyone, and so naturally I will have some less-than-stellar comments. I don't take it especially personally. I have never been really upset by anything in my evaluations until I read the student remark about Jones. THAT was the single most upsetting thing that has ever been written in my evaluations.]

I can't quite get excited about the new semester until I've finished the old one, and that won't happen for another week or so. Grades are due on 20 December, so until then I'll be reading drafts, answering questions from students, calculating percentages, and reading finals.

Then I can start being excited about travel/geography books.

breaking through, or: the challenges of teaching literature

I'm not teaching children's/YA lit classes this year, for the first time in more than two years. Of course I write my syllabi to play to my strengths, and so I include Alice and Peter Pan, which is always a delight to teach because it's just so weird.

Today was the last day of Peter Pan discussion, and, as often happens, students expressed some of the usual claims against critical interpretation. One student referred to the text as a "fairy tale," which is technically inaccurate but theoretically quite interesting; "myth" might be a better term, since Peter is a mythic character, to himself and everyone else. I tend to think somewhat strictly about the definition of a fairy tale; there's a category of story, with character types and plot structures of its own, that comprises fairy tales, and anything else must fit into some other category. But what if I expand my definition? What might we get if we play around with the idea of "fairy tale," not just as a formal designation but as a kind of reception practice? I think there's something there, though I'm not sure what.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching literature to non-lit students, to non-majors, to non-readers, is convincing them of the value of critical interpretation. Most of my students throughout my teaching have been non-majors; they've been psych majors, and biology and engineering, and political science, and business, and nursing, and a few rare history majors. I get a scattering of writing majors as well, but their approach to reading literature also tends to have its own bias; they read, in part anyway, to learn and study their craft. This can make for staggeringly good class discussion, as when one writing major pointed out a strange flaw in Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You. This book, he said, has no adjectives. He pointed to a passage that recounts the protagonist's birthday; she tells us she received "a keychain" from her best friend. The writing student said: "just a keychain? why not a keychain shaped like a pig? or a joke keychain? it's a detail - the mention of the keychain - that totally fails to tell us anything about any of the characters."
This launched us on a discussion of the Missing Adjectives in the book, and how that had a kind of flattening effect - it was great.
Other writers get wrapped up in defending the intention and prerogatives of the author no matter what; those often stem from a writer's own anxiety about her work being mis-read, misunderstood. This I can appreciate, but is also a critical and interpretive dead end.
But the overwhelming criticism - the biggest block I have to chip away at - is the idea that the texts are "just stories. just entertainment. just a kid's book."
In discussing Peter Pan in class, I asked the class something to the effect of "how do we feel about Peter's fate, his never-growing-up-ness, by the end of the novel? Is it good, bad, neutral?"
Several people responded with varying answers (and how I love when they have diverse reactions), and one said "it's not like he's a real person." She seemed to be suggesting that this unrealness made answering my initial question almost moot: how can you form an opinion, or an emotional reaction, about a person who doesn't exist?
In some ways, it's not a bad question, though for me as a reader it's both frustrating and baffling. But I think my bafflement is a mirror image of that (and other) student's frustration. My sense of why read, why books, why stories, has so many facets and many of them have to do precisely with my opinions and emotional reactions to nonexistent people. I read for plot and pleasure, of course, but my brain also runs a kind of critical background scan all the while, thinking about representations of women and children and play and reading and toys and so on. For me it makes almost NO sense - in an almost-literal way - to not do this kind of critical reading. But for today's student (and many like her who have expressed identical positions), I think her worldview, her brain, is calibrated in such a way that it makes NO sense to do that kind of critical reading.
It's a really fundamental difference in how one sees reading and story. Obviously, I'm terribly biased and think that my way is the right/best way, but this isn't a question with right or best answers. In the way that I think and see in stories and texts, other people think and see in numbers or logic patterns or mechanized forms. I'm essentially incapable of thinking in numbers, and I shook off my mathematical training as quickly as I could (after junior year of high school, I let it all slide out of my mind). For other people, including students like these, they did that with their english classes.

The difference, I think, comes in how we handle being confronted with the opposite of our way of thinking. I sulked through math classes, and repeatedly asked my parents why such a hideous thing was being inflicted upon me, since it clearly had no practical application (don't know why I was a math-only utilitarian, but there it is). My parents' answer: it's training different parts of your brain.
This is actually an excellent answer, possibly the only answer, to why am I being forced to learn/do this?
It was not satisfying to me as a 15-year-old, but even fairly early on in college, once the book-nerd part of my brain was being trained effectively for the first time ever, I began to understand and appreciate the idea of math training.
If I got plunked into a math class of some kind, I don't think I'd put up a wall of resistance. I wouldn't, though I'd be tempted, to pull a Calvin & Hobbes "math atheist" move. Being a hippie-dippy liberal-artist literature nerd has the effect of making me open to multiple interpretations, lots of possibilities, to the idea that there are no hierarchies or essential right/wrong, good/bad binaries.
But science-oriented people often function in the opposite way. They do see hierarchies and right and wrong binaries. These are the students who ask, at the end of a class, "so what DOES this book mean?" as if there was one simple answer. I always turn that question back to them, and sometimes I can see their frustration: "you're the teacher, why won't you just tell me the answer?!"
And maybe, as a corollary, their minds work in such a way that if there is no answer (no right answer), then that thing loses a lot of its meaning and value. So a text becomes "just a story," just a thing with no intrinsic value, a thing that is good or useful only for the length of time it takes to read. Once you set the book down, it's a done thing; it's used, used up, and you'd no more spend time pondering it than you would spend examining a grubby paper towel.

So the challenge then becomes how can you break through that, even for a bit, even just for a semester? How can you bring those students to a position where they are at least willing to start from the belief that there IS more than a story?

I wonder, sometimes, at the students who come in on day one, and leave on the final day, firmly believing that it's just a story. They must feel they've wasted their time terribly. But it also makes me wonder what is at stake for them; what is the fear/anxiety/resistance an expression of? What would it mean for them to accept the multiplicity of meanings, the idea that books can move people, that they can have an affect and an effect, that they can reflect and shape cultures?
Many of these "resistant" students are quite bright; they're not apathetic slackers. Very often, they're extremely smart and good at their fields - the engineers, the pre-med kids, the math majors, etc. So I can't chalk up their resistance to a lack of intellectual ability, or even a lack of curiosity.

Is it that for them to accept that their are many truths, and no fixed Truth, is as horrifying as it would be for me to accept that there is just a fixed Truth?

If this is the case, then, how do I negotiate some kind of middle way, some path that isn't horrifying to either of us?

It's a complicated question, and though my kneejerk reaction is to simply say: Well, this is a disciplinary issue; in literature, it's truths not Truth, and you'll just have to suck it up.
But then I think: how would I feel, dropped into a class where my instructor was insisting that it's Truth, not truths?


I do wonder how other instructors deal with this; how do you go about convincing those devout unbelievers that literature has value at many levels?

Books about books - notes for potential syllabus

It occurs to me that a general lit class about books about books (and/or reading, with a little writing thrown in) would be a pretty cool one to teach. Titles keep popping into my head, and I've decided to write them here, rather than on tiny scraps of paper which I will inevitably lose, or which some cat will puke on.

• The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (because manuscripts don't burn)
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Matilda by Roald Dahl (because Dahl's description of Matilda's reading is probably the best description of what reading does that I have ever encountered)
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
• Misery by Stephen King
• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (or one of its sequels, Lost in a Good Book or The Well of Lost Plots, which last is my favorite Fforde book)
• "The Composition" short story by Antonio Skármeta
  
• "Umney's Last Case" short story by Stephen King

What others am I forgetting? There are tons of books about books, or writing or reading - these are just the ones that come immediately to my mind. What other children's or YA books need to go on the list? And can I count Un Lun Dun as a book about a book?

teaching is hard work: a little-known fact about concentration

This semester, for the first time ever, I am teaching classes that are back-to-back. I have fifteen minutes between the two (which boils down to about six minutes of my own time - the end-of-class questions and comments always takes time, and usually the before-class moments involve solving someone's problem as well).  I've taught two classes on the same day before - one morning, one afternoon; once, I only had about an hour and a half between recitations (for the same class).
But fifteen minutes? shoot. that's nothing.

Each class is one hour and fifteen minutes in length. One, Representing Adolescence, is both a class I've taught before, and extremely familiar turf. I know my YA. The other, Myth & Folktale, is brand-new to me. And I am definitely a tourist in Myth & Folktale. But I've been working hard since late October to educate myself, and it's paying off (though next week, we start the ancient Greeks - Hesiod - and the real test begins).

The point of all this schedule talk is: I am exhausted when I leave school.
Why?
Because teaching is hard work.
Teachers, and the children of teachers (of which I am one), know this already.

It wasn't until a couple of summers ago that I realized just why class is so exhausting. I'd been teaching for at least two years by then; it was my third summer of teaching in the six-week intensive schedule (class twice a week, for 3 hours and fifteen minutes each day).
I was watching, on one of the last days, one of the girls fiddling with her phone, texting or checking messages, or something. Discussion was going on, and I was listening, but her phone was in a bright pink case and caught my eye. And in that moment I realized: when I'm teaching, there is NO daydreaming. No doodling. No checking messages. No working on my grocery list, or my To-Do list, or drawing pictures of cats and dinosaurs and bored stick figures while I listen to the professor or a classmate. When I'm teaching, my brain is entirely, entirely focused on the task at hand.

Usually, when we (people) do things, our brain is occupied, but there's room for a bit of multi-tasking. Cleaning and listening to music, for example. You can handily do both. Studying and listening to music, perhaps. I've had a couple of different kinds of jobs, including a Real Job as an Administrative Assistant at a national nonprofit, and I know how unlaserlike my focus was. You work for a bit, check some email, go to the bathroom. Get a drink. Work some more, while an acquaintance makes a face at you as she passes by. Set one task aside for another. Your mind can wander a little. In these here days of uber-connectivity and technology out your ears and twitter and facebook, the distractions are almost infinite.
It's not hard to find studies about this - a google search turned up a massive crop on productivity, distractions, etc. Whether distractions are good or bad, stress-inducing or stress-relieving, isn't the question here. The point is, it's likely that the average desk-job employee spends 20-25% of her workday NOT doing the work she's there to do - in other words, doing personal crap.
So much for "teachers work a shorter day."

See, in the classroom, there are no breaks to check facebook, or email. You can't put off your students, when they're there staring you in the face.

And to teach a discussion class - or even a lecture class - your brain has to be pretty close to 100% tuned in to what you're doing. You can't gaze out the window and drift away for a few seconds while a student is asking you a question. You have to be ON the whole time.
At first, I thought the tiring-ness of this was because I was new to teaching. But my parents - lifelong public school teachers, now retired - both said "nope. that never changes." It's always tiring, because the concentration required to maintain your class is tremendous.
And because every class is made up of different students, even if I'm teaching the same book for a second semester, it never becomes automatic or mechanized. There's never a point where I can detach my brain a little from what I'm doing, or saying. When the students talk, I need to be listening - and not just paying attention. I need to be processing their words and thinking as they speak how to respond. It's a little like the focus you need in a job interview - you cannot just start woolgathering while the HR person and the CEO ask you what you'll bring to the team.
So my three hours of teaching is three solid hours of work. Not 80, or 75% of three hours. It's every minute of that time.

Grading works the same way - you cannot actually grade writing and let your mind wander. So every minute of grading is a full minute devoted, not just 40 seconds. If my mind starts wandering, I have to stop work. You cannot effectively grade an essay if you've read six sentences with no idea of what you've actually read. there's no toggling back and forth. There's procrastination, of course, and the nice thing about grading is that you do that on your time frame (for instance, I don't have to show up anywhere at 8am to begin grading, and stay there until 5pm). I can start grading at 10pm and work until midnight. But those two hours? those are two solid hours of work.

One of the complaints, or criticisms, or snarks, leveled at teachers is "you don't work a full day" and "you get summers off."
The actual school day may be less than 8 hours, though many public schools require teachers to arrive well in advance of the students' arrival and the start time, so it's quite possible to spend close to 8 hours in the building. And you get a lunch break, and a work period (in which, as far as I can tell, most teachers spend their time doing work - grading, prepping, etc - and not checking facebook). But then you go home. And your bag is full of essays to read, tests to grade, texts to re-read for tomorrow, lessons to plan.
And again, a lot of that time - all the in-class time, and all the grading of writing - demands all of your focus and attention.
It's exhausting. It's draining.
But it's also, often, completely exhilarating - at least the classroom part is, at least for me - and that's what makes it worth while.

spring semester, planned!

I bit the bullet and slapped together my spring booklist/rough schedule for the adolescence class. This sounds much more haphazard than it really was; I've been musing for weeks now what to add, what to subtract, what to recycle, what to try new for the spring version of this course. I've read and read, I've made lists, I've informally polled my students. Finally, I realized I can't fiddle with the list forever - book orders were due three weeks ago - and so I just went ahead and put down the books that, for today anyway, seem most interesting/useful/engaging.

The list, in roughly the order in which we will tackle them:

The Breakfast Club
Freaks & Geeks
King Dork
Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Speak
Huge (TV show)
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
King of the Screwups by K.L. Going
I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader by Kieran Scott

along the way we'll read an introductory bit of queer theory, and an introductory bit of fat studies from Marilyn Wann.

It's a little trauma-heavy, but then so is the entire YA catalog. LIAR absolutely broke my mind, and I'm very keen to try it out on unsuspecting undergrads. The non-blonde cheerleader has the huge advantage of being set in Florida (a deliciously weird place), and is relatively trauma-free. It's a girl-centric book without being TOO annoying, and it - like King of the Screwups - turns the idea of "the outsider" on its head [sometimes literally, in non-blonde cheerleader].
Cracked Up to Be was pretty great, though it uses some of the same old cliches and tropes, but it does some interesting things as well, and is very dark. I think it'll be a nice trio with Speak and Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I'm excited about this semester.

Now, I just need to get my Myth & Folktale class organized, which - of course - is the real challenge.

reading Madapple

After trawling the lists of best books at the YALSA website, I collected a pile of teen fiction at my library on monday. Last night I started reading Christina Meldrum's Madapple, and it's thoroughly fascinating.
It's a terribly strange premise: girl raised by brilliant but wacky mother, kept isolated from modern life, essentially: no electricity, no running water, no mirrors, no television, no contact with other humans. Homeschooling - heavy on the science and botany/herbalism, other books with many passages redacted. Girl beaten for reading a hidden copy of The Scarlet Letter. Mother dies, girl has to cope.
Meldrum's got BIG themes and issues going on - metaphysics, theology, mysticism, along with all the other good stuff about family and identity and being that one finds in a really good YA novel.
I stayed up far too late last night reading, and I'm a little sulky now because I have to go to school, where I'll be busy all day and unable to read more.


In other news, I think I've decided on a general "theme" for my adolescence class in the spring, a theme so broad it's practically no theme at all. But the organizing principle is going to be .... difference.
I think I am going to put I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader on the booklist. *cackle* *cackle* *cackle*

now, off to teach grammar, and then day one of discussing K.L. Going's King of the Screw-Ups.

adolescence, again

Book orders for the spring semester are due in a week, and I'm teaching Representing Adolescence again. Because I like to mix it up, and because it feels a little shocking to me to teach the same syllabus twice in a row (like cheating, somehow), I'm going to do a mostly new booklist.

BUT WHICH BOOKS????

So far, the only title I have settled on for sure is Justine Larbalestier's LIAR.

But what else would be good? I haven't organized a theme or anything yet, I just know that I need to teach Liar.  I'm contemplating Courtney Summers' Cracked Up to Be and/or Peter Cameron's Someday this pain will be useful to you, because they are books I like a lot, but I'm not quite sure that I really know what to do with them.

I'd like to stick to mainly realist fiction, novels or films. I may do some TV again - some Glee, perhaps, maybe some bowing to the inevitable and some Freaks & Geeks.
But the books are the essential, and I'm just not sure which to choose. The course, after all, is about representing adolescence, so the books need to lend themselves to thinking about the ways in which adolescence is represented, regulated, etc.

Any suggestions? I'm vaguely tempted to do some of the books I have real problems with: Twilight, 13 Reasons Why, Like the Red Panda because I think they'd provide good discussion. At the same time, do I really want to read any of those books again?

Suggestions?
Ideas?
Advice?

discomfort in the classroom

I'm thinking about the uses of discomfort in the classroom lately.

One of the very excellent grad student teachers in our department has, as a standard clause in her syllabi, that uncomfortableness will happen in her classes. That discomfort is part of the critical learning process. This instructor, who is BRILLIANT, is a person whose gender is not readily obvious, and who in fact doesn't fully occupy either side of the (false) gender binary. This - along with the content of the courses - is part of the discomfort.

She was one of the instructors and mentors we had as first-year teachers, and I vastly admired her position on this - it reminded me in certain ways of a strand of New College-esque "fuck shit up" attitude that pervaded a number of my classes there. From the queer activist perspective, shifting and dodging and denying binary identifications and categories is all part of the plan for disrupting those binaries. It forces the undergrads to confront categories that they may never even have considered before. Discomfort is a good thing.

This week, I have been teaching the extraordinarily smart (and now, depressingly, canceled) ABCFamily show HUGE.  In conjunction with the three episodes I selected for viewing, I also asked my class to read Marilyn Wann's "Foreward" to The Fat Studies Reader (2009).

One of the first comments a student made about HUGE is that watching it made her somewhat uncomfortable, but that she grew to like it and in fact ended up watching all 10 or 11 episodes over the weekend.
I asked them to consider the opening scene of the pilot episode - an overhead camera shot of the kids on the first day at Camp Victory (the so-called "fat camp") where the show is set, milling around and waiting for their turn at the weigh-in. The camera slowly moves in and down, panning across the kids standing around in pairs, in awkward knots, as individuals who don't yet know each other.

All of the kids are wearing bathing suits.

All of the kids are fat (in varying degrees).

It's dis-comforting. We're not used to seeing images of large groups of mostly-unclothed fat people. We're not used to seeing fat people without either the fuzzy black bar of shame obscuring their faces (in stories about the OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!!) or the punchline of a mostly-cruel joke at the fat person's expense (sometimes told by the fat person herself).

When Will, the main protagonist, played wonderfully by Nikki Blonsky, finally takes of her shorts and t-shirt, mimicking a striptease right in front of the camp director - intentionally aimed at the director - we get lingering shots of Will's body in all its fat glory, in relatively close-up, well-lighted shots.

Both Wann's foreward, and HUGE, ask us to reconsider, or consider at all, a number of things we're mostly used to ignoring. Wann does it more stridently, more explicitly, and more forcefully; HUGE does it more subtly, more emotionally. But both say: LOOK.
Wann makes the great observation that all one can diagnose from looking at a fat person is one's own level of prejudice and stereotyping. The act of looking at another can - and often does - tell us vastly more about ourselves than it does about that other person. This is not a new or original idea; it's part of what makes the critical concept of "the Other" circulate so frequently and potently through almost every kind of subaltern studies that exist. Looking at the Other is a way of looking at the Self. If your gaze is properly calibrated - say, by reading Marilyn Wann, or by watching a show clearly framed through a fat-positive, queer sensibility - this Other/Self looking can be revelatory and positive for both parties.
Examining your own life of privileges and oppressions is essential, Wann argues, for critical work in the field of fat studies.
But this is the case in all fields, in all areas of life: ignoring or failing to properly address one's own privilege and oppression makes it almost impossible to speak well and convincingly about anyone's privilege and oppression.

But to look at yourself, to say "I experience these privileges every day, because I am thin/beautiful/male/young/straight/affluent/healthy/white/etc" is hard. It's even harder to say "I experience these privileges at the expense of people who are not thin/beautiful/male/young/etc." It's hard - though maybe less hard? - to say "I experience those oppressions because I am fat/plain/female/old/differently-abled/poor/brown/etc."
It's even harder to realize that you can exist in both privilege and oppression simultaneously: Wann points out that the very thin anorexic knows as much about fat-shame and oppression as does the very fat person.

But seeing one's own privilege, when before it always appeared simply as "the way life is" - THAT is uncomfortable. Having to look where before we looked away, or were simply not shown something - THAT is uncomfortable. Having to address our uncomfortableness - THAT is uncomfortable.

It's also learning. It's education, it's critical thinking, it's cracking open your brain and your perspective. It's like being given glasses that allow you to see a whole new color in the spectrum, one you never even knew existed. And now that you know about it, you can never unsee it, or forget it. Even if the glasses are taken away, your mind and memory retain the impression of that new, unexpected, unlooked-for, color.

It feels sometimes like I'm being lazy in the classroom, that I'm not actually actively teaching anything. I felt like this last year, over Octavian Nothing: Kingdom on the Waves. The ways in which my students responded to that book - what they focused on, how they reacted, what confused, upset, pleased them - all had to do with the content of the book, not specifically with anything I said in some brilliant lecture [I don't lecture, to begin with]. Same with Marilyn Wann, and watching HUGE - the moment they saw that opening scene of all those fat kids in their bathing suits, the work of discomfort and learning began. I didn't do anything except provide a context, and choose the texts.

Is this even teaching?
But perhaps that is a question for another day, another post.

Meanwhile, discomfort reigns in my classroom, and I am making us all continue to stare at it, to live in discomfort - at least for one more day.  

adolescence will be represented thus

I've made my decisions, for the most part, for my Representing Adolescence Class.

Novels to be read:
Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
The Boy Book - E. Lockhart
Someone Like You - Sarah Dessen (I finally picked a girl book!)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green & David Levithan
King Dork - Frank Portman
King of the Screw-Ups - K.L. Going

We will watch The Breakfast Club at the start of the term, as a way to just leap right in and also as a way to talk about stereotypes, adult/teenager power differentials, and the rise of teen-oriented media.

Television shows:

My So-Called Life: two of the first three episodes, and "Life of Brian" (which is focalized by that adorable Brian Krakow and is the one where they go to the school dance).

Glee: "Preggers" (the "single ladies" episode; Kurt joins the football team & comes out to his dad); "Wheels" (about life in a wheelchair; fundraising; Artie) and "The power of Madonna."

Daria: episodes TBA

Huge (if available): episodes TBA. I may only use one, maybe two episodes of Huge, but probably the very first episode.

We'll do some secondary reading as well - I may force them to read some of G. Stanley Hall's insanity-inducing Adolescence (he coined the term! and believes in Lamarckian evolution! and eugenics!). But we'll definitely read some other stuff: if I can find them, good essays on Fat Acceptance, Queer adolescence, Music & Adolescence. 

I discovered a truly astonishing pop culture blog recently (made more astonishing by the fact that its incredibly prolific and talented writer was in college when he began it) with a brilliant essay on Brian Krakow as the best teenage loser of all time; it deals nicely with Brian in the context of the show, and in the larger context of teenage losers in media.

I have a jolly article from a few years ago about "Kids Today get an A+ in Narcissism," which should provoke SOME decent discussion. Unless the Kids Today in my class are so narcissistic that they can't even discuss something so....not about them, personally.

In the books and such we've got:
teen pregnancy

death of teenager

death of parent

rape

coming out to parents, friends, self

Relationship Angst of the highest order

girls being accused of being sluts

girls being pressured to have sex

girls having all their friends (and the whole school, even!) turn on them

bullying of varying degrees of physicality, up to and including braining our protagonist and landing him in the hospital with possible (very minor) brain damage

Fat Camp

Body Image Issues
Queerness, queerness and more queerness
Disability
the perils of being Hot
the perils of being a Dork
Guns in School
Smoking pot


and more.

it's a fiesta of Issues. 

For quite awhile, at New college, there was a dumpster behind the cafeteria. someone had spray-painted on it: WE'VE GOT ISSUES.


I think of this often. And it essentially sums up the Young Adult genre as a whole.


I am delighted and excited and absolutely, 100% geeked-out over my class. I haven't finished ordering the readings/viewings or selecting secondary readings, but the bulk of the class is in place, and I'm ecstatic.


let's hope the Kids Today don't let me down.....

notes on a syllabus: ADOLESCENCE

for kicks, I plan syllabi. In fact, making up courses and syllabi (all in my head, never committed to paper) is how I discovered/decided that I was interested in teaching in the first place. I got all geeked out and excited about planning how I would teach certain books, what kinds of assignments I'd create, and I realized that - though all my life I'd resisted the idea of teaching [in large part, I think, because both of my parents were teachers, and I saw firsthand the nonsense they had to put up with] - I was actually really excited by and attracted to the possibilities of teaching.

Now that I have taught for five years - a total of thirteen classes, I think, all but two of them entirely of my own design - I get to make real syllabi. At present, my future teaching opportunities while still in grad school are uncertain, so I'm kind of back to making up imaginary classes and syllabi. Which is fun.

I've been thinking seriously about an adolescence/YA syllabus - there's a course at Pitt called Representing Adolescence that I'd love to teach. So I'm jotting down some ideas here, in the event that this - or some other - YA class comes my way. Because it's "representing" adolescence, I'm thinking film, television, etc in addition to YA books.

Representing Adolescence:

My So-Called Life (selected episodes, at least 2)
King Dork by Frank Portman
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (?)

something from the Judy Blume oeuvre
I haven't read/seen any, but Gossip Girls, I think
Slam by Nick Hornsby (?)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, maybe

what movies would work? I keep thinking of Labyrinth, because I really do think that's quite a good female-adolescence - coming-of-age story. The movie Thirteen is hugely obnoxious and problematic, and therefore pretty interesting to talk about, though painful to watch. It would be awesome to include some MTV - shows like Beavis & Butthead, or my personal favorite Daria; there are also the "Doug" sketches on the old MTV show "The State" - Doug is the rebellious teenager who has nothing to rebel against.
Catcher in the Rye seems like an obvious choice.
I really, really, really want to include at least one queer title - maybe Will Grayson, Will Grayson
I could just do representing adolescence in my childhood and throw in Heathers, or Pump up the Volume.

I wonder, too, how fantasy would or could fit in to a course on representing adolescence. I keep thinking - horrifically enough - of Disney's A Little Mermaid, which is a movie I hate, but which really insists on the teenageriness of Ariel.

I'd need to include some secondary/critical sources. G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence, of course, excerpted, but what else?? I'd LOVE to have a collection of newspaper or periodical editorials and such about Kids These Days that would cross a broad historical period.

what else?

course idea: brainstorming

It occurred to me last week that it could be awesome to put together a sort of science-fiction children's/YA lit class. Initially, i thought an all-time-travel syllabus would be cool, but then the idea of parallel worlds occurred, so I imagined a split course, half time-travel, half parallel worlds (problem: what parallel world books would I use? and how to avoid just teaching everything Diana Wynne Jones has ever written?)

Tentative booklist:

Time-Travel:
The Story of the Amulet
A Tale of Time City - Diana Wynne Jones
The time of the ghost - DWJ
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead
HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban

something like Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series?? where does THAT fit?

Parallel Worlds:
Golden Compass, maybe even the whole trilogy - Philip Pullman
Howl's Moving Castle?
The Merlin Conspiracy?
Narnia

I'm sure there are a zillion more titles that I;m not thinking of. It would be very interesting to poke around and see what kind of 19th-century time-travel books I could scare up (Jules Verne, maybe? HG Wells, The Time Machine, a book I haven't read - ?).

I love planning syllabi! even for imaginary courses that I'll probably never teach. Making up imaginary classes/imaginary syllabi is how I discovered/decided that I wanted to be a teacher.

syllabus-making

as soon as i posted my blithering about not knowing what to put on my syllabus, i realized i had at least a second awesome title: I AM THE MESSENGER.

so: Un Lun Dun, and I am the Messenger.


now: build-a-theme workshop time.

new books, old books

I'm excited that Forever Rose is out. I'm patiently waiting to purchase my copy for reasons which I decline to go into here (they have to do with a new job, and potential discounts). In honor of Forever Rose, I re-read Caddy Ever After, which I found semi-disappointing after the first three Casson family books. The first-person narration puts me off. But on the re-read, I dealt with it okay. I still found it lacking; I especially don't like Rose's first-person narration, but I'll live with it.

The second volume of Octavian Nothing is due out on 14 October. Again - new job, discounts, and I'm excited. I really, really like The Pox Party, and I'm keen to read the next installment. Judith Plotz gave a phenomenal talk about the book, and Rousseau, at the 2007 ChLA conference, and I get all intellectually wound up when I think about it. That excitement carries into reading the book, of course, and so I'm anticipating the second book quite, quite eagerly.

I happened to be in a bookstore over the weekend, and as always, I checked out the children's/YA sections. And was floored to see a stand-alone cardboard display featuring Ellen Emerson White's novel The President's Daughter.
Reasons I was floored:
1) I read The President's Daughter when I was probably 11 or 12, so early 90s. I got it from the library used book sale. I always liked it a lot as a young reader, and when I re-read it sometime within 2008, I was happy at how well it held up. But I always assumed it was out of print, or something - it's from 1985, semi-topical, and though a really terrific read, not the kind of book that libraries are scrambling to stock NOW.
2) There's a SERIES. There are FOUR titles! FOUR! poking around online, I see that they were brought back in print in 2008 (election tie-in, hurray!). I'm skeptical about the quality, since they sound pretty freaking melodramatic, but White's writing in The President's Daughter is tight and witty and highly, highly enjoyable. I'm scheming now to get my hands on all three subsequent books, and cannot WAIT to read them.

I felt a bit sad, actually, realizing that White's premise - the teenage daughter of the first woman elected President - will be fiction for - well, probably quite some years. And recalling the scenes when Meg, the eponymous heroine, attends a NOW speech given by her mother, and sees how overwhelmed with happiness - joy/tears - that a woman is President - reading that as a younger reader, I never quite got it. But having seen Senator Clinton's campaign - and worse, or more - seen the hideous way the media has responded to the selection of Governor Palin as VP candidate - then, I understood why a group of feminists would cry with happiness at the election of one of their own (Meg's mother is quite clearly a liberal and feminist).

on the Old Books front: I dipped into Stephen King! re-read "The Langoliers" and "Umney's Last Case," which lead me to a very tattery copy of a Raymond Chandler book of short stories, which I've been reading rather delightedly this evening.

I've been struggling, a lot, in the last couple of weeks, with balancing my teaching with my politics. Teaching is activism, in my book, and normally I have no problems making that happen, but I feel like I'm not doing ENOUGH. I want to sit down with my class and read articles from the Times and the Post and wherever else media happens. I want to talk, at length, about what the hell is REALLY going on. I want to make feminism a real, meaningful, necessary force in the world, not just a weird group of man-hating lesbian bra-burning feminazis, which, alas, is what my group this summer believed feminists were. even my smart, liberal students had been tricked by this heinous Limbaughesque rhetoric.
I love children's literature for a lot of reasons, but a big one is because every issue that's important to me politically surfaces (as it does in most texts), and because - more for my students than for myself - these texts are formative for children's personal beliefs. I care about that, surely, but I'm more interested in shattering the beliefs of my students, or at least making them examine their own beliefs. But I'm feeling limited by rollicking adventure stories, by the choices I made for my syllabus.

bouncing ideas helps

I've been struggling for - well, most of the summer - to put together a KILLER syllabus for my fall childhood's books class. The summer edition went so well, and I want another fabulous, exciting class. I couldn't just duplicate the summer syllabus, for a number of reasons, not least my desire for a course that has greater historical breadth.

I had a few titles I was determined to use: The Golden Compass, Alice, Peter Pan, Story of the Amulet, a Roald Dahl title, some Janeway and Newbery, Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses.

But what was my theme? what was the organizing principle of the course, other than a generic survey?

So i talked with my friend B last night. B is a fellow grad student, and probably the best grad student teacher amongst us (of all the grad students currently teaching, probably, and CERTAINLY the best in our year). She's a medievalist, and doesn't know children's lit in any special way.

I ran my ideas by her, and she said: "wow, these all sound really disturbing and weird."
and then "why not just do that? focus on the disturbing, the darker parts of children and childhood?"

!!!!
!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and I will.

Death, grimness, poverty, the supernatural/spooky, disturbing, bizarre, the child imperiled - THAT will be my theme.
Rossetti fits perfectly, now. I can do Stretton, and Andersen's fairy stories (and a few of Grimms' or Jacobs' fairytales, probably). I'm contemplating excerpting from The Jungle Books - "Letting in the Jungle," which I found a very sinister and terrifying story (as well as being a representative of Kipling, as well as featuring the wild child, Mowgli).

I'm thinking of including Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind, though it's been some years since I last read it; but Diamond dies, and that's creepy enough!

One of my decisions - to be made ASAP for book-ordering purposes - is WHICH Dahl to use? Initially, I planned to use Matilda, but after talking with B, I think The Witches makes a MUCH better choice.

What other texts would be good in this syllabus? I'm going to include The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (supernatural + Aslan's death + Edmund's Badness), and I'd like to put in HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban (the dementors - need I say more? though Order of the Phoenix would be much more appropriate, I don't think any of the books after book 3 can work as stand-alones).

Suggestions welcome, please!!!! especially any from, say, 1890-1970. I have the contemporary overbooked as it is (it occurred to me that Snicket is IDEAL for this class!), and the Victorians are well represented, but anything before 1840, and after 1890, would be fantastic!!!

what a tangled web we weave

Today my class discussed Charlotte's Web. They are all such smart kids. I was intrigued by a few comments they made, though, especially one girl whose basic stance is:

this book is allegedly all about the cycle of life and death, and how dying is a natural part of life. except wilbur never dies; he becomes famous, and fame is a way to live forever. so really, the book values immortality more than it naturalizes death.

This student did not especially care for the book, I think. Or rather: she had issues with it.

it was interesting. this re-read of Charlotte's Web, for me, really focused on the wonderfully orderly structure of the book. it feels so organic - as it's meant to, i think. we move so easily from season to season, and White lingers over details of the natural world so beautifully - it's quite a symphony of words and structures, really.

i've never been a special fan of Charlotte's Web - i mean, it's a great book, I like it a lot, but it's never been one I hold especially close to my heart - but it's a beautiful piece of craft.