Tuesday

Well Tuesday started off better than Monday. I got up after a late night. Well, a late night for me (we watched our hometown girls basketball team lose a nail biter in overtime to our cross county rivals - after waxing the floor with them twice during the regular season). I got up early - ran my two miles. Headed off to work - no car problems. And things have been flowing smoothly (outside of my little bout with the copier. It clogged up several times on me. And then I was going to past together an article from a local newspaper to use with my college comp class, so I grabbed a scissors and tape and headed off for the copier. But I found I was just able to fold the paper and get the article to work without cutting and pasting. But when it came time to head out, I couldn't find my tape anywhere. I scoured the table in the copier room and found zilch. Then I noticed a second stapler - one with '211' scratched into it (my room number). Apparently I was off somewhere in my head and grabbed the stapler instead of the tape dispenser. Absent minded).

We are two chapters deep into TKM. After today we'll be five chapters in.

In College Comp we're examining several stories and poems from various critical perspectives. I found a great book ("Critical Encounters In High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents." So I'm stealing some of their strategies to use. Yesterday we read some poems and applied reader response to it. The book makes an interesting note on how reader response has really dominated the high school landscape in recent years. I first heard of it when Dr. Reynolds at BSU mentioned the word "schema" and the phrase "activating prior knowledge." I never realized that was reader response, but now I see the connection - focusing on how the student can find their own meaning in the text via their own personal experiences. Hell, I've been forcing kids to analyze texts this way for 10 years. I guess this is in reaction to the old 'formalism' approach where students' own ideas were discouraged. The only thing that counted was the text and its meaning. This turned poetry and stories into mysterious things that students tried to master by going on symbol hunts and quests to find THE meaning (which was either confirmed or rejected by the teacher).

We've also looked at feminism, post modernism, Marxism, and Allegorical perspectives. It's fun stuff.