Fry’s opera and the definition of Irony

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Ooooooooooooooops.

I’m afraid to say that I feel like one of the worst teachers this week. For my monday session, I literally forgot to create a lesson plan.  Now I know what you’re saying; this idiot doesn’t deserve to ever be placed in front of a class. You’re probably right.

My plan was to come up with a lesson plan on Sunday. I have been keeping up pretty well with my homework and editing etc., so there should have been no problem.

However, when I woke up Monday morning, it occurred to me that I had no idea what I was going to talk to my students about. Oops! Perhaps I got spoiled last semester because I didn’t have to teach until 1:00 p.m. Well let this be a lesson to you all to make lesson plans farther into the future.

Learning to Read and Write

This week’s assignment was for my students to read the essay Learning to Read and Write, by Fredrick Douglass and turn in a one page reflection that focused on one of the questions at the end of the essay. I haven’t had a chance to read through the reflections yet.

What I like to do on fridays (at least so far this semester) is to use the essay questions to start a conversation, since every student has been reflecting on at least one of them, and just kind of see where it leads.

It started off on a bit of a rough foot today. We were discussing the ways in which Douglass shows that slavery and education are inimical to one another. I asked them if they thought that any of the major political parties relied to any degree on an uneducated voting base. In my own head I was thinking of the “hillbilly vote,” the lower class rural christians who will vote for any candidate who is against abortion and for prayer in schools. I suspect, however that this argument can be made for both major political parties.

Anyway, that just didn’t get very much traction. Not the end of the world in my opinion. I try to make it clear to my students that, when we are having a class discussion, we can sort of “throw things in the hopper” and see if we find them interesting. If they aren’t, well that’s ok too. So I let it drop.

However  Learning to Read and Write turned out to be a pretty good vehicle for discussing Logos, Pathos, and Ethos, which we had been working on earlier in the week. The questions I asked that got some good discussion going were these:

Can you find specific examples in the essay where Douglass is using Logos, Pathos, and Ethos?

Which of the three might be more useful if Douglass were trying to persuade a slaveholder? why?

Would your answer be any different if you were looking toward persuading someone who was undecided on the slavery issue?

After that, we had a few minutes left so I asked them if they thought there was anything comparable  to slavery today, even if not as bad. I asked them if they thought “wage slavery” was anything like slavery. They decided that it was not comparable. Somebody brought up the plight of child laborers who get paid like a penny for every nike they make. This made someone think of child soldiers. Turns out that one of my students wrote an essay last semester about that subject so he had some valuable things to say on the subject.

then it was time to go. I think it turned out to be a good class for my students and myself.

Logos, Pathos, Ethos: Sticky Post

This post has moved. Please click the link below for a handout and power point

http://www.elegantmistake.com/fycomp/wordpress/?p=7

A Woman’s Beauty

Today for class, I had my students read Susan Sontag’s essay, A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source. After that asked them to discuss the following question:

The last woman I tried to get a date with was incredibly beautiful. You should have seen this girl. She had big brown eyes chestnut hair and a face like a young mary tyler moore. for a long time, I didn’t ask her out. not because I was shy or anything, but because I felt like the only reason I wanted to go out with her was because she was so beautiful, which is a totally lame reason to date someone. For that reason I didn’t ask her out and I didn’t even get to know her for a long time. Eventually, however, I bumped into her at a party and struck up a conversation. Turns out she has a really great personality, smart, funny, doesn’t talk too much, etc. At this point I said to myself, ok this is good. I should ask her out after all. Of course she turned me down. most of you know me, can you blame her?

so my question is this: Was I stuck in the trap that sontag is describing in her essay? or put it this way, do you think I was assuming that a woman as beautiful as her is unlikely to have a good personality (which sontag seems to be arguing we do) or was I avoiding the trap because I waited to see what her personality was like before asking her out?

I was hesitant about sharing a personal experience like that with my class. But I had a feeling that it would work and it turned out pretty well. I got a fairly decent discussion going. About four or five students were actively engaged and the rest were paying attention. For one thing, I think that dating is something that all my students are interested in. Female students usually have some kind of opinion when it comes to issues of beauty or a woman’s role in society.

I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling that teachers don’t often share stories like that with their students. I also have a feeling that, if done right and not in a “creepy” way, teachers can make their students feel like a part of a community. The end result of this, maybe, just maybe, could be that students will be inspired to contribute to the community and not view the class as just a chore.

Just a side note, I personally feel that this exercise would have worked just as well if the above mentioned female had decided to go out with me. Oh well. Better luck next time I guess.

Honey I Shrunk the Ethos

A certain number of my fellow composition teachers have a real problem with what they call “qualifying statements.” These are are things like saying “in my opinion,” and “I would argue,” or the ever popular “I think.” My comrades often complain: don’t tell me that you would say or argue something, just do it. Any kind of qualifying statement, my co-workers would argue, detracts from the argument, the all-important argument that is the mainstay of academic writing.

I believe they have a good point. However, I am also reminded of a quote from Aristotle: “for it is not the case, as some of the handbook writers propose in their treatment of the art, that fair-mindedness [epieikeia] on the part of the speaker makes no contribution to persuasiveness; rather, character is almost, so to speak, the most authoritative form of persuasion” (Rhetoric Book I chapter 2). In George Kennedy’s notes to his translation of this passage of the Rhetoric, he says, “Why would they say this? possibly it was thought to weaken a speaker’s position if at the begining of a speech he showed himself as too mild rather than took an uncompromising position or demonstrated outrage.”

Are we missing what Aristotle saw as “the most Authoritative form of persuasion”? Students are almost universally admonished to completely eliminate their own character from their academic writing. The most obvious example of this is the more-or-less standard rule that students should never use “I” in an academic essay. But I believe that the eradication of the student writer’s self goes somewhat deeper than that.

My own personal experience has taught me that there is a significant element of college composition teachers that want their students to completely eliminate their ethos from their essays. This is understandable; students tend to be younger than us. They tend to be less educated. They tend to have less well-formed ideas about the things we think are important.

I worry that this last reason might be the impetus behind the school of thought that tells students to remove themselves from their own writing. Granted, students shouldn’t be writing personal narratives as academic essays, but I really wonder, and I would love to hear from you all, if we are in danger of overlooking the ethos that Aristotle found so important.