If you’ve been reading my blog regularly, you know that I have an interest in community centers that cater to the educational and developmental needs of the city’s youth. Yesterday I learned about yet another one. The New York Times recently had an article on how the children of Mexican Read more…
In the commencement speech given at Bard College at Simon’s Rock earlier this year, Ronan Farrow expounds on a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Out of a Silent Planet on the topic of experience and memory, and how they are one and the same. Farrow tells the audience that what he Read more…
At NYU there is an expository writing course called Writing the Essay, which all university undergraduates must take in their first year. I’ve listened to many an undergrad complain about the course, and not coincidentally, I can’t think of a single TA in my acquaintance who hasn’t had to reteach these students the basic skills of writing an essay: how to open an essay; what a thesis sentence is and how to formulate one; how to introduce quotations and other sorts of evidence in body paragraphs; how to conclude an essay, etc.. With an already tight semester, there is no way to go about teaching all this without making students feel like they are going through writing boot camp.
So what goes wrong during the semester when students are supposedly learning how to “write the essay”? (more…)
Credit: Amazon
Even as it is told from the particular perspective of a Chinese-American boy, Gene Yang’s graphic novel has been lauded by readers and critics alike as a unique piece of young adult fiction that speaks to the universal teen problem of wanting to change something about yourself in order to “fit in.” I picked up the book last month with very high hopes but was left distinctly irritated by the time I got to the end of the work. I still can’t decide, however, whether and how I want to teach it.
To be sure, my discomfort with American Born Chinese is not uncommon. In an interview with Kartika Review, the author himself cites the Christian subtext of the plot as “the number two most controversial part” of the book (the first being the outrageous character Chin-Kee, who is an old Hollywood caricature come to life).
Credit: Acephalous
If we are honest with ourselves, the image is as funny as it is offensive, and I think that blogger and teacher Scott Eric Kaufman is right to warn educators that students may be very reluctant to dig into the taboo humor of the character because to do so would require confronting their own intimacy with the stereotype. But I also venture that by virtue of his exaggerations, Chin-Kee demands comment and can thus facilitate a provocative discussion on race.
What troubles me more than Chin-Kee is the racial subtext that is a bit more insidious, and which is directly related to the Christian subtext. To be clear, I don’t have a problem with the fact that there is a Christian subtext, but with how it informs the message on race/ethnicity. (more…)
Right now I’m listening to Tina Fey hosting “The Hidden World of Girls” on WNYC. (Both hours are podcasted here!) One of the coming of age rituals described by the callers is an old American Indian (Sioux) rite of passage that was recently revived in the 1990s. The ceremony requires Read more…