Are we working yet?

I love seeing my students engaged, even if it's in fits and starts, always peeping over the edges into the world beyond the mind, as if to say, "I'm here but I'm also outside of here." When students settle into the internal musings of the mind, the silence that envelops the classroom is sublime; it shimmers with electricity, and I can feel its energy.

Ms. Frizz Takes the Class to Ghana

Here is a small map of the whole country, but I would like to have someone in charge of more intricate mapping so that we can follow our detective on his journeys to solve the murder in the novel The Wife of the Gods.

We begin our journey in Ketanu, which is part of the Adaklu-Anyigbe District of the Volta Region in Ghana. You can see Lake Volta on the map, and I am linking this site to the Google maps so you can see a better image of the whole area: http://www.maplandia.com/ghana/volta/

Time to get off that couch!

Okay, it is time for your first formal essay, and I am counting on each one of you to have taken careful notes in class, have worked assiduously outside of class, and have done the necessary preparation to draft, revise and finally submit the best essays that you can possibly produce. I urge you all to share you work with someone else in the class, using the Google documents feature to allow each of you to review and recommend while you are both online. Try it out and let the rest of us know how it works out for you. Make SURE that you have done several revisions with feedback before you commit to your final draft, as I will expect you to have worked the essays over for correct grammer, logical sequences, and developed examples.

Here's to getting off those sofas or couches or wherever you do NOT get your work done! I am checking my CCP email for thesis statements and have received only one so far. Get on it!

Measuring "well educated children"

Here you are, hopeful scholars grappling with the issues of academic learning! In today's New York Times Susan Engel, director of the teaching program at Williams College, writes in the Op-Ed section of the paper "Scientifically Tested Tests" where she takes on the notion of testing to make students and teachers perform better. She urges instead that we should be measuring "the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstrct principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live."

I am reminded of Sherman Alexie's essay "Superman and Me" and the way he valued his "interest in using books to gain knowledge." Now that you have been in class for two weeks, which of Susan Engel's measurements do you believe is the most important for college level learning?

Let's begin!

I am going to begin this blog with an invitation to my students to enter into the conversation about classroom issues, academic issues and political issues. I post this lovely cow/oxen - I could use help on which it is when it has no horns - in the hopes that you ALL will take the time to mull over things that we learn and discuss; Perhaps this fellow isn't the most thoughtful of species, but he's got ears that suggest he listens and a face that suggests he is in TUNE!

So, this is a blog, many of which do not fold in photos but rely solely on language. I will use this space to pose questions or just pick up discussions we have had in class. After reading the first paragraph of Thomas L. Friedman's essay "Power to the (Blogging) People," can you respond to the idea that because China does not have "democratic elections," the whole arena of blogging has become "the de facto voice of the people"? What does it mean to have NO voice in the government but then to have a tool like this where you can voice your opinions, join forces with other like-minded people, and realize that there might be something more powerful than the official voice of the government?

With a Gmail account you should be able to respond to this post, and I look forward to reading what you have to say - of course, in your VERY best, grammatically correct, prose!

Light in the halls

While students and teachers scurry from class to class, meeting to meeting, office to office, I move slowly, searching for where the light hits - a banister, an edge and here a corner and a sparkling floor. Seeing the sunlight glisten in this little marble corner sends me into secret glee and joy, imagining how I could paint it, capture the cornered pleasure on a flat surface. While I am sent reeling with joy, I patter towards my classroom, mulling over possibilities and painting and patching and anything else I can do to conjure the momentary joy of light as it leans into the corners of the mundane. And this is what I found when I arrived at class - bubbly, giggly, girly and gleeful students on the last day of class, itching to leave early, just as I was itching to capture more of their energy and artistry. This is Yvonne. And Leonard, ready for that exam, laughing along with the others, always good natured and engaged, contributed endlessly. Charlonda, enthusiasm itself, designed a masterful review booklet for everyone; an up and coming elementary school teacher, Charlonda showed us how thorough and imaginitive she will be as a teacher. I know the other students were wishing I was as ingenious in reviewing for exams. Hart is the one who created a reworking of the "Stackalee" poem in his video, packed with violence, male posturing and female strutting, he moved from killing his friend to his running hell, all done in contemporary terms such that students began laughing, hooting and hollering from the very start to the very end of the video. Brittany made the "crackers" that Harriet Jacobs writes about in her narrative, and she claims she wants to try the recipe again; she promises the bisquits were quite lovely when hot, but by the time they got to the class, they had hardened and probably resembled more of what the slaves made. And now we get down to the business of preparing for the exam and presenting the papers on research and on reviews. Here Latia sits with Nazeer to her right, then Andrew and to the far left, Jasmine; she and Nazeer performed the rap contest where Nazeer was Stackolee and Jasmine was a convincing Philis Wheatley.

These are my students...

The second day of creative presentations brought the following powerful projects, and I was utterly shaken by the polish and finesse with which each student gave his or her response to the materials we had read this term. From the folktale, the rap, the singing, the baking, the building, the poetry and the short story of the fist day, the students of the second day followed with as much force and passion as those who had made me weep on the first day. These are all students who have certainly brought more to this class than they will ever take away, and I am grateful to every single one of them for their commitment and their drive to express their identification, their understanding and their connections to the materials in this literature course. I have learned more about race, humanitity and that enigmatic love that binds ALL of us during this term than I have in any other endeavor. I can only count mysef as priviledged to work with such an array of talented, big-spirited students as I have had this term in this course. Thank you all for teaching ME the enormous bounty of love that you all shared with each other and with me.

Andrew Laws read his poem "Nigger (To Call Myself a Man), a poem that asked, "Who am I can call myself a man?" when the narrator is disempowered to such an extent that he has been "Whipped/ Burned/ Branded/Bruised/Beaten and battered." The poem ends with, "I am nothing/But a nigger."

Alannah Caldwell read her poem "Are We Slaves - Then or Now," in which she challenges our notions of what makes us slaves," and showing that African Americans are just as much enslaved by popular culture as they were with chains.

Dennis Carroll read his poem "A Peace of Mind," the mind of a slave who came over on the ships and whose mind is only a "piece" until the end of the poem when his "piece of mind" becomes a "peace of mind" because of the bond he share with other African Americans who share the same ancestry and history.

Latia, a student who showed us photographs of her white mother, read her poem called "Undefeated," a passionate poet in which she looks at her identity, claiming her "ancestors, to whom she "is forever bonded together" because "we are strong" "born to endure."

Desiree Rivers depicted "Four Women," written by Nina Simone, a song she spoke as she moved from Aunt Sarah to Saffronia to Sweet Thing to Peaches, all versions of African American women. She memorized and spoke the words as she moved seamlessly from one depiction to the next, changing costumes and attitudes as the posture and representation of the women changed. Here she is Aunt Sarah, followed by Sweet Thing. Hong's focus was a portrait of a woman with mixtures of races and colors. gray in the middle of her face to represent the time when we all meld into one color and one race. His project was inspired by William Wells Brown's novel Clotel: Or The President's Daughter. Catherine stitched the most imaginative, creative quilt with images of W.E.B. Du Bois's veil, flying slaves from the Vernacular tradition of folk tales, Harrient Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and others. Many of these images were sewn inside windows of a house that held many of the authors and stories we've read.