making things, helping people make things better
This evening in EN340 is the first class of full-on literary analysis, and we are reading several of Anne Bradstreet's poems. I love starting with Bradstreet in this class because we're discussing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing as a political and self-conscious act that is in some ways always about its status as "women's writing." So …
Continue reading "Teaching Anne Bradstreet through deformance"
Tomorrow I meet for the first time with my EN490: Major Authors course, which I'm so excited about! It's a larger class than I'd anticipated, but hey--the more the merrier. And, the more folks I can turn to into followers of Patricia Highsmith, the better! This is a writing intensive class, so we'll be doing …
Tomorrow I will meet for the first time with two of my three classes, EN203: World Literature 1450-1800, and EN240: Introduction to Visual and Cultural Study. I've had the real pleasure of teaching EN203 a few times before, so I'm looking forward to adding some new texts and removing a couple I've grown--how shall I …
http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf Invigorating the lecture on Prezi
http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf Anatomy of a film: Developing student thinking through collaborative analysis on Prezi
What's on the agenda for EN102 and EN200 today? Well, I'd like to start thinking about the coursework right off the bat--it's always best, in my book, to begin challenging the class so as to set a productive tone. Especially in composition 2, where students generally need practice with managing time and approaching tasks effectively. …
Classes resume on the 11th of January for us here at Marymount, and I have to admit, last term was a bit of a supersonic blur--and the holiday "break" was anything but, given our trip to Philadelphia for a serious several days of interviews. Syllabi are due on the 4th (er, that would be today!), …
Continue reading "New Classes, Old Classes, Reimagined Classes"
Instead of lecturing on the introduction--part of my larger goals this term to avoid lecture as much as possible, in favor of stimulating discussion that works outwards from the text--I'd like to focus our class time on Petrarch's letter in which he describes the mountainous ascent he undertakes with his brother, as well as some …
Continue reading "Petrarch, Interiority, and the Tensions between Earthly and Spiritual"
Tomorrow in Anatomy of a Film, I'm planning to show a clip from Night of the Living Dead that should work as a good springboard for a discussion of the key elements of film form, which students should have read. We'll discuss conventions and prior experience; the way we register emotion within the film and …
I'm determined, this term, to not fall into either the 1.) going-over-the-syllabus-the-first-day cop-out or the 2.) jump-right-in-to-lecture cop-out, both of which so often become standards (usually because we're so busy prepping courses, finishing syllabi, or participating in the pipe-dream of having all the basic course plans for the entire rest of the term in some …
Tonya Howe 