Day 4: Best Day So Far (or is it the espresso talking?)

Man, am I flying when I drink 5 shots of espresso before class -- this may be a problem since I was actually cheering in class and jingling my foot. I will try less shots next week!

I love working with the TAs because I do such a better job in my classes when I am learning from the TA's ideas. DeeDee talked about dealing with the n-word in her class and I realized that I needed to do that too. So, to start class today I said that as the students knew there was a racial slur in the text. I asked, "How should we handle this slur when we are working with the text?" The students seem startled that I brought this up but talked about dealing with it directly because it was there (if you are reading it aloud and it is there, say it unless it makes you uncomfortable). I asked if this couldn't possibly be painful for some students, to hear. The students seemed to want to reach consensus that we were in an educational space and we weren't referring to it out of malice and that if someone felt uncomfortable they could say so. I asked if they really thought that someone who was uncomfortable would actually admit it and they thought not. I have several students who identified themselves as African-American and who talked about how they saw any use of the word we had in our work as legitimate. I said that I wouldn't use it becuase no one needed to hear it from yet another white person in power. I asked them what they thought of that. They said essentially, do what you are comfortable with. I asked them if they thought using it or not using it unduly gave the word more power, but our discussion kind of petered out after that. Next time I might have us write about this last question and focus the conversation there.

Okay, next we did our qw. The entire class today was aimed at preparing students to work on their essays this weekend. I wanted to build on the work we had done focusing on W as a writer to connect the way the text is written to Wideman's project.

Here's the qw:
QW (15 m): In their introduction, B and P talk about how every reader has a personal take on what they read. There are multiple ways a reader of "Our Time" might interpret this text, might say this is Wideman's project, this is the most significant part of this essay. In this qw, identify a major theme, idea, or problem you see in this essay. If someone who hadn't read this essay asked you what "Our Time" was about what would you say and why?

While they were writing today I noticed that most students were working with texts that had marked. Hurray! After they wrote, I asked them what they wrote about and put their ideas on the board. Here were the topics they generated:
Family
Causation/Downward spiral
Ego
How to tell a story

Many students added several dimensions to each broad category, so we had rich subtopics (family structure, mothers, etc). I added in place/community.

Next I told the students they would work in groups on the topic they were most interested in. I went through each and had students raise their hands if they wanted to work on that topic. When there were more than 5 people, I created two groups on the topic. The smallest group had three people. They moved to join their groups and I gave them the following prompts for their groupwork:
1. Describe how this theme, idea, or problem is developed in the essay. Have specific places in the text to point to.
2. Why is this theme, idea, or problem important, according to Wideman. Please have a quote to back this up.
3. How do Wideman's moves as a writer (for instance the elements we discussed in the previous class) relate to this theme, idea, or problem?

I gave the students 25 minutes after which they reported back to all of us. It was really successful. Finally, I handed out the essay assignment and we talked about it briefly. I pointed out the work we had done all week prepared them for it.