Author Archives: Professor Sample

Thoughts on Teaching Presentations

Thank you all so much for the continuing thoughts, reflections, and comments on the first round of teaching presentations.  We’ve generated a tremendous amount of productive conversation on this blog over the course of the semester, and this week was no exception. There was a shared anxiety about the teaching presentations that I had wanted to address here, but Edith already did it very nicely:

There seems to be a recurring theme here: I should have done this, It wasn’t the lesson I wanted to teach. Because there is this repetition, I don’t feel so bad saying the same thing again. THIS WAS NOT A REAL CLASS AND THIS WAS VERY HARD TO DO.
We were actually asked to do two things at once: both teach a class and explain why we did what we are doing.

Edith is exactly right here. I am asking you to do two things at once: to teach a lesson and to explain at the same time why you’re doing it.

I recognize that this is extraordinarily difficult. As if teaching weren’t hard enough already, I’m asking you to “go meta” in the actual process of it. What we need is some sort of VH1-style pop-up bubbles to annotate yourself. This is why I’m fascinated with Karen’s idea to film her lesson. If we had enough time and resources, we’d have everyone film themselves teaching, and then annotate the footage with the explanations and rationales that I’m asking you to give during the presentation. It’d be a refinement of the “think aloud” videos from early in the semester. Except instead of a think aloud, it’d be a “teach aloud.”

The value of this very blog space is that it lets us come close to this annotated presentation. We can use the blog reflections to say what didn’t work or what we had wanted to do in an ideal world, but it’s also important to think through what did work, given the strange nature of the teaching presentation, the 20 minute time limit, and the other artificial constraints. And in general — and I think you’ve all recognized this in your reflections — there was a lot that did work, or at the very least, a lot that gestured to what would work in a real classroom. (Not that ours isn’t a real classroom, but you know what I mean.)

Keep up the good work.

One of Hemingway’s Cultural Codes

Scholes spends a good deal of time discussing how Mantegna’s disturbing depiction of the dead Christ (“Very bitter…lots of nail holes”) figures in Hemingway’s fiction. Since I imagine this specific image is not part of our daily cultural vocabulary–and Scholes suggests it ought to be in order to push through from interpretation to criticism–I submit for you here the painting (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).

Mantegna’s “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ”Finished sometime around 1490, on the cusp of the Renaissance, “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” now hangs at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

So seeing Andrea Mantegna’s painting, does Scholes’ argument make more sense? Or do you, like myself, have some doubt about what Scholes’ particular critical move is in this chapter? How does familiarity with the image, or with the history of its genre (the dead Christ figure) help us adopt a critical stance toward Hemingway? If it does, how might this strategy (i.e. focusing upon a seemingly marginal cultural allusion, or a pattern of such allusions in a text) work with other texts, helping us help our students become more textually empowered?

Annotate This!

Here’s the annotatable (is that a word?) version of Group Two’s Think Aloud. Feel free to experiment. Hover your cursor over the gray circle on the video timeline. Then click on the green plus sign to add a comment, or click on an existing comment to add a follow-up response. If people are interested in this, I can make Group One’s video annotatable too.

Sherry Linkon article in Pedagogy

Sherry Linkon wanted us to know that she’s formalized her electronic posting on her Critical Inquiry project into a longer and more contextualized article in Pedagogy:

Linkon, Sherry Lee. “The Reader’s Apprentice: Making Critical Cultural Reading Visible.” Pedagogy 5.2 (2005): 247-273.

Mason subscribes to Pedagogy as an e-journal through Project Muse, so you can all check out the article (on-campus link), if you’re interested in reading more about Sherry’s project.

VKP Critical Reading Posters (PDF)

I know that reading and printing the online electronic posters from the Visible Knowledge Project can be somewhat schizophrenic, given the multilinear layout and use of pop-up annotations. To make things easier, I’ve compiled all the reading material (the posters, pop-up annotations, and handouts) into a single PDF file: VKP Critical Reading Posters. I still encourage you to explore the VKP site, but when it comes to what you need to read and print for Wednesday’s class, it’s all in this file.

A Virtuoso on the Rubik’s Cube

This may be slightly off-topic…or not. Inspired by Naomi’s post about her son mechanically solving a Rubik’s Cube, I thought of this famous video, of the film director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), “solving” a Rubik’s Cube with his feet.

What Gondry is really doing, though, is presenting us, much like a detective novel, with a puzzle…


Michel Gondry Solve Rubik Cube With Feet

Welcome to ENGL 610

Welcome to the class blog for ENGL 610:002 (Spring 2008), at George Mason University. This site will be an essential component of the course…as you will soon discover.

If you are a student in ENGL 610:002, you can go ahead and register for the blog. You may also browse the class guidelines and calendar.

I’d like to hit the ground running on the first day of class, so please note that everyone should read the following article prior to Wednesday: Lee Schulman on “Taking Learning Seriously,” published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.