Jude in the Classroom

The other day I posted a list of books that I need for this class that I am undertaking independently. I have some further information about that, but I'll get to it later.

This past vacation I spent a good deal of time reading Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Now I am not done with the book; in fact, I am probably a good quarter of the way done, but I am beginning to really like what Hardy has to say. In the first part the main character - Jude - decided to study on his own and become a scholar; unfortunately, his plans were way-laid by a woman. It was not that he had fallen in love with the woman of mention and decided to marry her, but she wanted to become betrothed and in turn lied to our hero Jude and told him she was pregnant. Jude, being an honourable young man, married for the pregnancy as it was the proper thing to do; however, in the end, it turned out she consciously lied.

Students are not usually big into reading, so it is important that we find novels that fit state guidelines, but at the same time, have qualities that interest them. While Jude the Obscure may be a bit of a difficult text for high schoolers, I think some of the males may take to it as this image of a woman lying about pregnancy, or in fact, becoming pregnant, in order to keep a man from leaving is something they may have seen in their lives.

With that said, I will get back to the first few lines I spewed forth. My list has begun to dwindle. I ordered Jude the Obscure, and The Professor gave me Waugh's The Loved One. Also, I would like to make a special mention of thanks to my friend the Semi-Gleaner who gave me a copy of Forster's A Passage to India which he acquired illegally in Italy. (The publishers of this edition noted on the front cover that it is illegal to re-sell the text anywhere but the United States.) On top of all these texts seemingly falling into my lap, I have the Sixth Edition of Norton's English Literature, which has both Wilde's, and Beckett's works in it.

Buy Me Books

I have confidence that most English majors, or English teachers find solace in libraries and bookstores. More so bookstores than libraries, as the bookstore allows for ownership. They allow the buyer to purchase a ticket to a world unknown.

There's two types of book stores - chain bookstores, and private bookstores. In the private bookstores there is a quiet resemblant of the silence in a library. A silence allowing the books to do the talking. The calling out to a new audience delicately tip toeing through lengths of shelves that need a ladder to reach the top. A book gives us direct insight to the author's mind; an intimate relationship unattainable any other way, and a bookstore is full of hundreds of these relationships waiting to bloom.

Unfortuatnely, as a college student, new or used books are too expensive and instead we must turn to websites like Amazon.com. It is no bookstore, but it suffices. The other day I mentioned that I spoke with The Professor about the class I will be taking with her. We ended up putting a tentative book list together. It is as follows (they're all links):

Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Oscar Wilde - "The Importance of Being Earnest"
Samuel Beckett - Endgame
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
Evelyn Waugh - The Loved One
W.Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence
John Fowles - The Magus
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Zadie Smith - White Teeth

It's British Lit, and while I've read the classics - "The Rape of the Lock", Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein - but I'm looking forward to reading some more current stuff, and some other classics.

If you have money and don't know what to do with it, buy me the cheapest books on this list.

A Brief Overview

Through out the class we will be using basically two texts and one style guide. The first text is an anthology put together by Diane Durkin and Lisa Gerrard called Seeking Common Cause: Reading and Writing in Action. Now I don't actually own this book as I use copies of the texts to be read provided for me. The second text that we are using is the New York Times. As I am not a student of the class, I don't have to buy this, but it is provided for me which is really quite nice in the grand scheme of things.

The class is broken into three units - the first of which was completed on October first with the submission of the students first "long" paper of six pages. In this unit the students looked at the image of self in regards to the popular media. We looked at images in the New York Times and advertisements in magazines such as People, US Weekly, and others of that sort. We also read pieces that were concerned with plastic surgery and body image. While still in this unit we took a trip to a local art gallery to view artwork that was concerned with women in suburbia. Students also used these images to frame their final paper for the unit.

With the closure of the unit we have moved to the image of self in the work place. We are looking at different jobs and perhaps sexism, or racism in the workplace as the class is all females with a handful of non-white students. We have not really delved into this unit too far yet as the first class and a half was spent watching a documentary on Wal-Mart and how awful the corporation really is. Then Columbus Day struck and we missed class. We began by reading a piece by Mike Rose and students are looking at different types of jobs, and what they mean to the individual.

In the most recent class, students were asked to create a collage based on the themes we have been discussing and their personal feelings. Some students took pictures from magazines, while others took titles or words from the New York Times. Students were then asked to write a response paper for next class, explaining individual pieces of their collages and the overall grand view of them.

Now that I'm caught up - to a degree - I can keep this thing updated when I get back from class.

Catch Up

So it goes like this:

I graduated from St. Lawrence University in 2005. I was pretty sure I wanted to teach, but was one of those college seniors that failed to think about graduate school and a job until spring break -- too late to apply for much. Scared and lost I decided to apply for a job teaching English in South Korea. A month after getting my oh-so-precious piece of paper, I was half-way across the globe trying to teach kindergartners how to speak proper English. Luckily, I had taken some undergraduate education classes so I wasn't completely lost. I had to return to the States pre-maturely -- for a reason I can tell only if you ask -- and decided that teaching was in fact what I wanted to do for sometime of my life, perhaps all. I applied and enrolled in an MAT program at a small private college where I now reside in a leaky apartment.

One of the classes I'm currently taking requires that we keep a blog of our expierences in the classroom. For most people this would be their expierences while completing the state mandated one-hundred hours of observation time, or their internships at local schools. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I completed my observation hours while bumbling through my under-graduate work and won't be embarking on my student teaching until the Spring semester, long after this assignment is due.

I was told that I could update this blog with responses to the assigned reading, and figured this would be what I was doing. Then I realized, I am in a classroom. Earlier this summer I was approached by a professor and encouraged to apply for a graduate assistantship. I did so and am currently a teachers assistant for an English 101 class - hence this wonderfully creative title. No doubt there will be differences between a high school class, and a college class, but the intellectual level that the students are on should be about the same as it is doubtful that the summer between your senior year of high school and freshman year of college is that transforming.

Tally Ho

Just seeing how things look.