A Sense of Doubt blog post #1362 - Lower Columbia College - ENG 101 - Tower Winter 2019 semester

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1362 - Lower Columbia College - ENG 101 - Tower Winter 2019 semester

Hello reader,

This is my blog entry to  prospective students interested in taking either of my English 101 classes in the Winter 2019 term at Lower Columbia College.

I am chris tower, a writer of stuff and a reader of many books, some illustrated and some not, some on paper, some digital, and some audio. I play Ultimate, cycle, and walk my dogs.

I see all composition courses as tools to teach students to write academic, thesis-driven, persuasive essays with topic sentence structures.

To achieve this essay goal, I provide a variety of prompts to inspire students to explore subjects in depth, develop their critical thinking skills, take substantial projects with relatively complicated instructions and requirements from formulation to completion, and immerse themselves in the world of ideas, which are the intellectual pursuits of all college students and the mission of any liberal arts institution.

And I want to put the FUN in FUNKY while also encouraging students to QUESTION EVERYTHING, EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY, and BREAK THE MEDIA TRANCE!

Students seem to agree. Here's comments from an actual LOWER COLUMBIA COLLEGE student:

Hey Chris, just wanted to give some feedback and say that I am really enjoying the class. I have enjoyed the essays that we have done so far, although I have found them a little challenging. But I am glad that they are making me a better writer. I also wanted to say that I really like the aspect that you brought about how you are on our side. A lot of teachers I have had in the past never understood how school can be stressful sometimes when students have other things going on in their lives, so it's nice to finally have a teacher that does. So thank you for that. But anyways, I know you said you liked hearing feedback, so I just wanted to say I have really enjoyed the class. See you Tuesday!

Satchel Paige Tower 1612.11

So, maybe things are going well in class. Listen to the power of quiet people.

So let's get into it. This is meant to be a short post about my plans for next semester. It's just a sketch, and a way to communicate what I am planning. The readings we do provide provide prompts for the essays we will write.

There can be no writing and no learning to write without BOOKS.

And comic books. I like comic books. But... WHERE ARE MY DAMN ROCKET BOOTS?

Or should I say graphic novels? Would that make it seem more adult?

So, here's my books for next term, Winter 2019.

Required Texts

·                     Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates - ISBN-13: 978-1925240702

·                     Culture Jam – by Kalle Lasn - ISBN-13: 978-0688178055

·                     Binti – by Nnedi Okorafor - ISBN-13: 978-0765385253

·                     Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ISBN-13: 978-1401245252

§  Alex + Ada: The Complete Collection by Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughn           ISBN-13: 978-1632158697 

With the books, I intend to step through the following content: education, racism, white privilege, and liberal arts; beliefs and persuasion and WEIRD SCIENCE; the current state of the nation and kairos; the self, becoming the self, individuality, AI, consciousness, and Jungian Psychology; the coming of age story and African cultures; and consumerism, capitalism, corporate control, the American culture, and mass media.

The first book we're going to read is Ta-Nehisi Coates' National Book Award winning letter to his son on what it means to be a young black man in today's world: Between the World and Me.

I plan to intersect this book with talks of race and racism, experience as a person of color for those who are, or confronting white privilege for those who, in Coates' words, "believe themselves to be white."

Students will write a letter to a family member or close friend in much the same way Coates's book is written to his son, investigating the racial landscape of their world but also providing advice about college, liberal arts education, and their future goals.

Students will examine the ways colleges promote themselves with slogans and memes and advertisements and answer the burning question that many try to answer for themselves and others: what's college for? AND Why do we go to college?

Category one subjects: Standard, academic thesis essay material. Subject conforms to problem-solution concept. BEWARE the pitfalls of popular subjects.

Category two subjects: Write a persuasive essay about a personal belief of yours that can be reduced to a simple motto.

The argumentation paper. No composition class exists without it. At all levels, teachers want students to conceive fresh and bold thoughts for which they argue, about which they attempt to persuade their poor unfortunate readers to feel as they do. Simple.

          Not really.

As the stalwart English instructor fighting the good fight, standing on the front lines, trying to help mold the minds of the students who pass through the educational transom, I have been traditional in my approach to the argumentation paper, despite overwhelming evidence that such an approach was failing. Part of the failure came from believing that students would forge ahead, boldly go, delve into new territories. I engineered the assignments adequately. I required source material found in actual libraries with shelves, books, and academic journals. I advocated clever brainwashing...er, I mean, BRAINSTORMING approaches to attempt to engender students to write exciting, fresh, original papers. In other words, not papers I had seen before, not papers that they had written about in high school, not the same old lame papers on abortion, teenage suicide, runaways, legalization of drugs, euthanasia, the death penalty, and a wide panoply of other bloodless topics that cause me dyspeptic fits.

But, alas, to no avail, as a silly young writer once wrote repeatedly.

Write a paper about something you believe in strongly, some motto you stick to that helps you live your life.

Here’s some ideas:

“Why being nice to people earns rewards”

“Secrets of my success”

“Why the five adjectives that best describe me can help you create the life of your dreams”

“The Golden Rule: My Number One Motto”

“Farting rather than holding it in and other ways I buck convention”

“Sharing: Why the world would be better if we all did it”

“Pants not skirts: utility is everything”

“Naps: Do you need more sleep than you’re getting”

“Embrace Uncertainty”

“Question Everything”

“Perform one random act of kindness and one senseless act of beauty each day”

“Shop ‘til you Drop: the joy of spending and NOT spending money”

“Find Joy; Bring Joy”

“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”

“Never grow up: Just don’t tell anyone”

“Honesty: the best policy”

“Dance your way to spiritual wholeness and happiness”

“Self Reliance and Civil Disobedience”

ANOTHER DISCLAIMER: You may have noticed that the majority of the paper titles reflect positive ideas about life and the universe. I prefer advocating the positive. However, if you really want to write something negative, then I encourage you to do so.

Much like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in which he advocated ending the Irish potato famine by eating the children, these essays can be provocative and inspiring.

So if you’d rather write “Why I Hate People” or “Revenge can be sweet and very satisfying” or “Why men and women are incompatible” or “Ignore Authority: Why I should be King/Queen of the world” then by all means, go ahead.

We're going to read and write about TWO graphic novels.


The first one is probably the most famous of all: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Using the idea of kairos, we will examine the way Watchmen used the events of the 1970s and 1980s to frame events in an alternate America mirroring our own nation in the present. I have not fully conceived of what this will be, but students will have the freedom of choice to examine issues that they care about and synthesize these ideas with the graphic novel and its content -- the movie not so much, but the upcoming TV show looks promising.

My examinations might be about what I have come to call "the State of the Hate Nation."

ALEX + ADA

I ordered the $50 hard cover collected edition. But the digital copies and the individual volumes (three) of the paperbacks are in some cases 80 cents each: AMAZON.

Alex + Ada is about a future world in which someone can buy a robot companion. The robots do not have independent consciousness and are not what we would think of as "artificial intelligence" or AI; they are human-like but not conscious like humans. The robots start to find the path to consciousness, individuality, personhood, but the company that sells them does not want the robot servants, companions, and love slaves to be able to think for themselves.

This book opens up issues of the self, individuality, AI, consciousness, which I foment an new ideology through Jungian Psychology and other concepts, such as gender and relationships.

This one's going to be REALLY great. Here's tons of art.

Lastly, we will examine consumerism, capitalism, corporate control, the American culture, mass media, and the idea of CULTURE JAMMING with the book Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, publisher of Adbusters.

Here's some of my thoughts...

The term "clutter and noise" comes to mind because it was featured in a documentary I used to show in my gender and media class called Dreamworlds created and narrated by Sut Jhally. He used the term to describe the flood of jump cuts, sound effects, music, and other "jolts" delivered in music videos to keep viewers engaged and to prevent them from changing channels.

For years in that Gender and the Media course, I taught the book Culture Jam written by Adbusters publisher Kalle Lasn, and now since switching courses I have taught the book in Effective College Reading. Despite being published in 1999, it's surprisingly fresh and relevant.

In fact, the evaluation of American consciousness as mentally ill is still accurate if not even more prevalent and common.

Early in the book, Lasn chronicles the landscape of postmodern mental health hazards in a section he calls "The Ecology of the Mind." He examines the mental pollution of "infotoxins" of the modern media-rich world of music videos, advertisements, TV, and more. This is the same panoply that Guy DeBord and the Situationists called "The Spectacle." Lasn describes modern media ecology in terms of noise, jolts, shock, hype, unreality, erosion of empathy, information overload, infotoxins, loss of infodiversity, and finishes the section by calling for an "Environmental Movement of the Mind" to restore peace and harmony to ourselves and our world by combating the mental pollution in which we are drowning (Lasn, 9-27).

adbusters_127_hollowman

As Americans and consumers, we're all terribly ill because our culture makes us mentally ill. At the beginning of "The Ecology of the Mind," Lasn describes the statistics of psychological ailments from which we Americans suffer. In counting the various illnesses, he concluded that 77% of the population "is a mess," calling us a nation of basket cases (In some cases, this claim does not apply to Lasn who is a Canadian -- Vancouver, Canada.) (Lasn, 9-27).

Lasn castigates consumerism as one of the culprits for America's "suffering" (which he criticizes as an embarrassing claim). "Plenitude is American culture's perverse burden" (Lasn, 11). He goes on to describe the quest for "MORE" to fill empty lives that seem to have "LESS." It's instant gratification that's the problem. Americans can gratify needs without having to wait, no denying their desires, no want, no hunger. "Eat the instant you're hungry," Lasn writes, "and, as the Buddhist master put it, "You will never find out what your hunger is for." Plenitude feeds the malaise as it fills the stomach" (Lasn, 11).

The idea of never feeling hunger is one that bears additional thought. Perhaps there are spiritual benefits to fasting after all.

Perhaps I need mental fasting. I need isolation. I feel as if I am suffering from a lack of simplicity and a disconnection from Nature.

Part of my problem is too much noise. We're drowning in noise. According to Lasn, "in 1996, The World Health Organization declared noise to be a significant health problem, one that causes physiological changes in sleep, blood pressure, and digestion" (Lasn, 13). Noise is still a problem in 2017. Maybe even more so.

I am sitting in the quiet now. I am not playing music. The TV is off. Nothing on the computer is jangling at me. I have muted notifications. I have not checked my phone in over an hour. And yet, the noise in my head has not been swept back into the sea; it has not been reclaimed by the tide and the undertow. I am still struggling to think clearly. I am still drowning in the clutter and noise.

adbusters_128_excavation

In 1999, in the writing of Culture Jam at both the end of the century and the millennium, Lasn commented that our culture was "stimulation addicted" (Lasn, 14). People want background music all the time. They cannot jog without ear buds and a Walkman. They cannot study without the TV on. Just think about how this passage would be updated today in the world of social media and smart phones. I live near a university. The majority of the students are literally on their phones all the time. Routinely, there's a lag now at traffic lights because the driver is looking at a phone screen and not the traffic light. Not a day goes by that I do not hear a driver honked at for sitting at an intersection with a green light. Sometimes I am the one honking. I see students looking at phones while the car is in motion or while they are walking through hallways and across campus. Dead time? Look at the phone. A lull in activity when nothing is captivating their attention? PHONE.

PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE.
PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE.
PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE.
PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE.
PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE. PHONE.

Full entry at

https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/11/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-854.html

Some last thoughts before you go if you got this far.

I am a gentle and loving soul in my approach to encouraging students and making them feel safe and comfortable to foster a thriving, supportive, and beneficial learning environment.

TO UNFREAK YOU ABOUT ENGLISH
- It's not algebra - English is something you use every day.

- PRACTICE, EXPOSURE, FEEDBACK, MOTIVATION

- You cannot learn everything about writing in one semester.
- Writing classes are not about your mistakes.
- We are not nit picky about grammar here ("writing  correctness").
- A writing class is like the Top 100 Album Chart From Rolling Stone magazine - you are at 25 - our goal is to at least get you up to 24th on the chart.

- PRAISE SANDWICH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- Writing is like exercise - learning to play the piano; you know when you hit a bad note.

TO COMBAT FEAR OF ENGLISH -

I give advice for improvement in a praise sandwich format: encouragement and praise, advice for improvement, more encouragement and praise.

SOUND AND VISION AND THE BRAIN. 

(Did I make you look?)

1000 days-1803.30

I am looking forward to a great semester!!

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1811.13 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1228 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.